This experiment examined the vowel responses of severely disabled readers and normal control children in reading orthographically regular nonwords. The disabled readers were divided into three groups based on their relative Verbal and Performance IQs. Following the rationale of Fowler, Shankweiler, and Liberman (1979), vowel responses were classified as incorrect or correct. Correctness was determined according to either context-free or context-dependent criteria. The main finding was that the vowel responses of two out of three reading disabled groups paralleled those of their reading level peers. However, disabled readers with higher Performance than Verbal IQs made significantly more context-free responses and significantly fewer context-dependent responses than all other groups. Moreover, knowledge of how speech is segmented at the phonemic level predicted performance on the reading task. The findings suggest that disabled readers employ very local (context-independent) strategies in reading; these findings are discussed in terms of the idea that disabled readers suffer a basic deficit in phonological processing (Liberman, Liberman, & Mattingly, 1980) or linguistic processing (Siegel & Ryan, 1984).

The present research was designed to systematically examine consonant errors made by severely disabled readers in an attempt to clarify the nature of their underlying disability. In our first study, three groups of disabled readers were compared to both age- and reading-level matched controls on their performance reading a list of 96 one-syllable nonsense words. As predicted, subjects in all five groups made many more phonetic feature substitutions than orientation reversal substitutions. This is consistent with previous work indicating that reading errors typically result from linguistic- rather than visual-processing difficulties. Further, subjects from all three reading disabled groups, but not from the control groups, made more consonant addition errors than any other error type. A qualitative, post-hoc analysis of the errors suggested that these additions were quite systematic for the reading disabled subjects. The second study was designed as a replication and extension of the first. Results were consistent with those obtained in Study 1. These results are discussed with reference to the possible underlying cause(s) of severe reading disability.

Researchers have gathered a variety of evidence to support the theory that learning to read in one's “mother tongue” or first language enhances a child's achievement relative to that of children obliged to learn to read in a second language. Evidence collected primarily in Europe and America has been applied by international organizations to support early mother-tongue education programs in many Third World countries. The data reported in this article suggest that a general application of this conclusion is not justified. The present article reports on a longitudinal study of literacy acquisition among 166 grade 1 children from a rural town in Morocco. Children in the sample came from two distinct linguistic communities (Moroccan Arabic and Berber), but lived in the same village, attended the same schools, and received literacy instruction in Arabic and subsequently French. The study also considered a number of background variables that might influence learning to read, such as Quranic preschooling experience, parental literacy, gender, and SES. Analyses showed that while there were significant differences in Arabic (first literacy) reading achievement between Berber- and Arabic-speaking groups in the first year of the study, such differences virtually disappeared by year 5. Quranic preschooling, also conducted in Arabic, was found to be a mediating influence on achievement in grade 1. Learning to read in French (second literacy) was unrelated to Berber or Arabic linguistic background, but highly related to reading achievement in Arabic, thus providing support for Cummins's (1979) “interdependence” hypothesis. Overall, the findings support the proposition that children in certain social and linguistic contexts need not be taught in their mother tongue in order to achieve literacy norms of the majority language group. These findings are discussed in terms of the context of language use and language prestige in the Moroccan setting, and in terms of their potential generalizability to other linguistic and cultural contexts.

Three different language samples were collected from a group of young adults, 18 to 28 years of age, and a group of elderly adults, 60 to 92 years of age: an oral questionnaire eliciting information about the adults' background, education, and current health and activities; an oral statement describing the person they most admired; and a written statement recounting the most significant event in their lives. In addition, the WAIS vocabulary and digit-span tests were administered to the adults. Age-related changes in the length, clause structure, and fluency of the adults' oral answers and oral and written statements were investigated. There was an overall decrement in the complexity of adults' oral and written statements attributable to an age-related loss of left-branching clauses which occurred in all three language samples. Correlations between the length, clause, and fluency measures from the language samples and the education, health, and WAIS vocabulary and digit-span tests revealed that better-educated adults scored higher on the WAIS vocabulary test, produced longer utterances, and used more right-branching clauses, and that adults with greater memory capacity, as measured by the WAIS Digits Backward test, produced more complex utterances and used more right- and left-branching clauses. Judges found the statements from the elderly adults to be more interesting and clearer than those from the young adults. This finding suggests that there is a trade-off between producing complex syntactic structures and producing clear and interesting prose.

Hearing impaired adolescents from three schools were asked to produce sentences expressing simple locative state relations. Subjects varied on three hearing levels, two ages, and the use or nonuse of sign language. All subjects wrote English sentences to describe pictures; signers also described pictures in sign. Data were analyzed using chi-square procedures. Errors of noun reversal and pragmatic focus were apparent in 7% of the signed responses and 15% of the written responses. Errors were produced by subjects at each age and hearing level, and by signers and nonsigners as well. Most errors were produced by profoundly hearing impaired signers attending public day school (as compared to residential school). Implications for instruction and for further research are discussed.

The influence of two different types of language therapy was investigated by assigning 32 patients to three groups: 10 patients were treated with a Systematic Therapy program for Auditory Comprehension Disorders (group 1), 11 patients received conventional stimulation therapy (group 2), and the other 11 patients received no treatment at all (group 3). Language recovery in the three groups was examined with a test battery consisting of two parts: Part I consisted of 3 subtests for auditory comprehension, which were also used as practice materials in the treatment program given to the patients of group 1; Part II contained 8 tests for auditory comprehension, reading comprehension, and oral expression, the items of which were not used as practice materials in either of the two treated groups. Although the influence of age, time post onset, and severity of the receptive disorder were controlled by multiple regression analysis, it was found that the differences between the three treatment conditions were far from significant on almost all evaluation tests of Part II, as well as on the evaluation tests of Part I. On the basis of these results it was concluded that neither the Systematic Therapy program for Auditory Comprehension Disorders nor the conventional stimulation therapy had any clear effect on the recovery process of the treated patients in groups 1 and 2. Some possible reasons for the failure to demonstrate significant differences in language gains between the three therapeutic conditions are discussed.