January 10, 1986

As yearlong trade talks draw to their scheduled close, United States negotiators said today that Japan had agreed to changes removing the last legal barriers to telecommunications trade. The negotiations began after President Reagan and Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone of Japan agreed at their meeting in Los Angeles in January 1985 that the two nations would conduct talks aimed at removing all barriers to American products in four trade sectors: medical equipment and pharmaceuticals; telecommunications; electronics, and forestry products. They also agreed to give the trade talks 12 months and then assess results. United States Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Foreign Minister Shintaro Abe of Japan are scheduled to meet in Washington on Friday to review the progress made in the talks. After their meeting, they are expected to issue a general statement summarizing progress, but the United States is likely to stress that more headway is needed.

STORYTELLING is back in dance, the pundits say. It isn't that plotless works have fallen out of fashion, or that minimalism is dead. But a look at the immensely varied dance attractions coming up all over town this weekend suggests that choreographers are indeed becoming more consciously involved with stories, emotions and relationships. There's a surrealistic version of ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'' to be seen this weekend, for example, and a new jazz-dance piece influenced by New York's history. Subject matter ranges from innocent fairy-tale heroines and stereotyped movie heroes to separation, role-playing and rites of passage.

Because of an editing error, a Washington dispatch yesterday on polygraph, or lie-detector, tests twice misstated a word in President Reagan's order of Nov. 1 authorizing increased use of such tests for Federal employees. The word is ''aperiodic,'' meaning the tests will be given randomly, and not ''periodic.''

The head of the Federal team investigating the fatal accident at a Kerr-McGee plant here last weekend said today that workers were unaware of the critical safety significance of their improper overfilling and heating of a chemical storage tank that burst. It was the first official indication that worker training failures played a major role in the accident Saturday at the Sequoyah Fuels Corporation, a Kerr-McGee subsidiary. Richard L. Bangart, who heads the 19-member Nuclear Regulatory Commission team investigating the accident, said at a news conference this morning that both the overfilling and heating, which violate plant procedures, led directly to the rupture. Plant Cites Detailed Procedures In an interview later, he said the workers ''did not know heat and overfilling were critical'' to safety when they oversaw those operations.

Cordless phones are on the ropes. So are ordinary color televisions, as consumers prepare for the day when stereo TV broadcasting is commonplace. Compact disk players are hot, as are a new generation of small, 8-millimeter video cassette recorders and cameras. But the real news at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show that opened here today is that the Japanese electronics giants are reversing gears.