Former French immersion students who had transferred to an English program because of academic difficulty and poor adjustment were assessed after their first year of total English education. Their cognitive, academic, linguistic, and social psychological status was compared to that of children who had remained in the immersion program despite academic difficulty. Academically, both groups showed similar improvement. Behaviorally, the transfer children continued to be deviant and to show poor attitudes and motivations. After one year out of French immersion, the transfer children maintained previously acquired second language skills. The data suggest that the child's basic cognitive and affective characteristics rather than factors associated with language of education influence academic achievement as well as school- and language-related attitudes and motivations.

Dialogic interaction between mothers and their age-matched or linguistically matched hearing and hearing-impaired children was investigated. The study employed the cognitively based System of dialogic analysis proposed by Blank and Franklin (1980). The System assesses each participant both as initiator and responder, and judges each participant's initiations for cognitive complexity and summoning power, as well as the appropriateness of participants' responses. Four samples of eight mother–child dyads were investigated, including hearing and hearing-impaired 2-year-olds and 5-year-olds. Results revealed differences between hearing and hearing-impaired dyads along most dimensions, including the number and form of initiations employed, the complexity levels of initiations, and appropriateness of the child's responses, as well as measures of the degree of dialogic exchange that took place in the mother–child dyads.

Language performance measures obtained from poor readers at 8 years of age were significantly poorer than those for matched good readers. Impairment affected both language comprehension, as measured by the Token Test, and language production, as measured by a detailed syntactic analysis of spoken language samples. Children with combined performance impairment (both comprehension and production) were the poorest readers, and children with no measured language impairment were the best. Subjects with single-modality impairment (comprehension or production) were average readers at age 8. By age 9, the combined performance impairment group had deteriorated in reading level (against age), as had the comprehension impairment group. The results support proposals for age-dependent differences between reading groups, and further suggest that syntactic impairment may exert a greater constraint on reading ability with increasing age.

Children assessed as reading disabled are often thought to use decoding processes that differ from those of nondisabled children. This assumption was examined in a study that compared the word recognition skills of a group of clinic-diagnosed reading disabled children with those of good and poor readers. Subjects read words and nonwords containing either regular or homographic spelling patterns. Regular patterns have a single pronunciation (e.g., -UST) while homographic patterns have multiple pronunciations (e.g., -ONE). Analyses of the errors, latencies, and types of pronunciations indicated that while the performance of the poor and disabled readers differed from that of the good readers, the two below-average reader groups were very similar. The reading disabled children exhibited decoding processes similar to those exhibited by younger nondisabled readers. The results suggest that many children who meet the diagnostic criteria for reading disability may be indistinguishable from nondisabled children in terms of actual reading performance.

In a recent paper in Applied Psycholinguistics, Stein, Cairns, and Zurif (1984) demonstrate that reading disabled children perform at a less advanced level relative to normals of the same age in comprehending a number of complex sentence types, including sentences with temporal adverbial clauses, such as (1): 1. The pig kissed the cow after jumping over the fence. (Please see erratum page at back of this issue for the corrected figures concerning this sentence from the Stein, Cairns, and Zurif article.)

While adults require the (missing) subject of jump in (1) to be interpreted as coreferential with the main clause subject (the pig in the example), normal children are frequently 6 or older before they develop this restriction, permitting a direct object NP (the cow in the example) to be made subject of (to control) the temporal clause. Stein et al. demonstrate that reading disabled children are slower than normals to develop the adult rule, a finding that generalized over both their comprehension of written and spoken language. In what follows, I point out some difficulties with the analysis of the adult grammar and normal development that Stein et al. adopt, and speculate on alternative ways of dealing with the facts of grammar and development for sentences of type (1). To the extent that these speculations are correct, our view of the nature of deficits may also be changed.

At the outset we wish to thank the editors of Applied Psycholinguistics for inviting us to reply to Goodluck's criticisms of our paper, “Sentence Comprehension Limitations Related to Syntactic Deficits in Reading Disabled Children” (Vol. 5, No. 4). Our response can be summarized in two points: First, the theoretical questions raised by Goodluck are largely unresolved and premature. Second, and most important, is the point that however the theoretical issues are ultimately resolved, one of the basic conclusions of the Stein, Cairns, and Zurif article remains unassailed – viz., that the interpretation of temporal complement constructions in English reveals a deficit in the grammatical System of some reading disabled children. This note will bear an organization analogous to that of Goodluck.

Due to a printer's error, two of the figures that accompained “Sentences comprehension limitations related to syntactic deficits in reading-disabled children” by Cecile L. Stein, Helen S. Cairns, and Edgar B. Zurif, published in voulume 5, Number 4, pp. 305–322, were incorrect, and the captions for all of the figures were omitted. We reprint here all of the figures, correctly, with captions. Our apologies for the error