Early pioneers in the field of learning disabilities were convinced of the important role that immaturity in oral language played in reading failure (Johnson & Myklebust, 1967; Orton, 1937); however, this direction in research was in large part sidetracked when theories of reading as a primarily “visual” act became prominent. For a number of years the dominant characterization of learning disabilities was that they reflected “visual–perceptual” deficits (see Vellutino, 1979). However, one reemerging conclusion that comes as no surprise to psycholinguists is that reading disabilities and oral language deficits are intricately interrelated. A sizable body of research indicates that children identified on the basis of underachievement in reading are less skilled than normally achieving readers on a wide variety of phonological, semantic, and syntactic tasks (see Donahue, 1986a, for a review of this literature).

The emergence of this body of literature coincided with a major conceptual shift in the study of language development, that is, from a dominant focus on children's syntactic and semantic growth to a broader consideration of how children learn to communicate with others. Researchers began to turn their attention to the major role that context – social, physical, and linguistic – plays in determining how and what language structures are acquired and used.

These two trends – the characterization of reading-disabled children as a subgroup of the language-handicapped population and a shift to the study of communicative development – converged on a third new area also forecast by early researchers in the learning disabilities field.