This study examined third grade children’s use of hesitations in elicited productions of derived words containing a stress-changing suffix ( -ity). Eight derived words produced by 20 typically developing third-grade children were phonetically analyzed for five different hesitation types. The number of hesitations used differed significantly as a function of the children’s linguistic skill. Children who were adept in their linguistic abilities used more false starts, but children who were weaker in their linguistic abilities used more glottal stops and pauses. Therefore, children’s use of different hesitations, found only through a phonetic analysis, may reflect their stored representation of the derived words.