Langmuir-like waves in the foreshock of Earth are characteristically bursty and irregular, and are the subject of a number of recent studies. Averaged over the foreshock, it is observed that the probability distribution P¿(log E) is power-law in the wave field E, with the bar denoting this averaging over position. In this paper it is shown that stochastic growth theory (SGT) can explain power-law spatially-averaged distributions P¿(log E), when the observed power-law variations of the mean and standard deviation of log E with position are combined with the log normal statistics predicted by SGT at each location. ¿ 2001 American Geophysical Union