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.

Researchers who study the writing process have found that beginning writers do little spontaneous revising of their own texts. This study explores the possibility that beginning writers do not revise because they do not read their own writing. The assumption behind the study is that explicit self-questioning strategies would engage young writers in reading their texts; thus they would become more active revisers. The experimental intervention is a question-prompt computer program (added to a word processing program) that guides the 11 to 16-year-old subjects to examine their own writing by asking themselves questions about their texts. This process was intended to engage the subjects in reading the text closely and revising more extensively. Analyses of the number and nature of revisions indicate that self-reflective question-prompts engage students in reading their texts and lead to significant changes in revising strategy.

Students speaking Hawaiian-English may have difficulty understanding the information presented in the classroom and thereby have less success at school. Children from standard English-speaking backgrounds and from Hawaiian-English-speaking backgrounds were randomly assigned to one of six listening conditions. The conditions consisted of the same selections, but the selections were either in standard English, standard English with Hawaiian pronunciation, or Hawaiian-English. Each of these three versions, in turn, had a simple or a complex syntax version. The semantic content remained constant over all conditions. There was no difference between Hawaiian-English and standard English groups when all comprehension conditions were considered, indicating that the two groups of children did not differ in comprehension ability. However, Hawaiian-English children gave more correct answers when the selections were in their dialect than in standard, while standard English children tended to give more correct answers when the selections were in standard rather than in Hawaiian-English. Contrary to expectations, use of simple syntax and use of Hawaiian-English pronunciation did not facilitate comprehension of standard English by Hawaiian-English children. Implications for educational accommodations will be discussed.

Blank-trial probe discrimination learning tasks were used to evaluate the hypothesis-testing abilities of 15 language-disordered and 30 normally developing children matched for mental age and language age. Children were presented with a series of two-dimensional learning set and orthogonal problems. No significant group differences were found in the learning set problems. All the children reached learning set criterion quickly, used a high proportion of simple object hypotheses, and maintained a high proportion of confirmed hypotheses. On the orthogonal problems, however, the language-disordered and mental-aged- (MA) matched children performed significantly better than the younger normal children. These findings suggest that the cognitive and linguistic deficits language-disordered children exhibit do not reflect an underlying failure to generate and test hypotheses. This conclusion, however, does not seem to apply to all language-disordered children. In the final section of the paper, language-disordered children's cognitive strengths and weaknesses are interpreted within the context of an information-processing model.

We investigated the development in preschoolers' conceptualization of the written system from its graphic rendering and its mapping onto meaning by analyzing children's writings and readings of their writings. Forty-two Israeli children aged 3.4 – 5.8 years were asked to draw, write, and interpret a number of utterances. By the age of four, children's writings became constricted in size relative to their drawings and were composed of linearly organized units separated by regular blanks. These units increased in their adherence to conventional Hebrew letters throughout the age range examined. Children's interpretations of their own writing were classified into five modes: Interpretation unrelated to the utterance; preserving the content of the utterance but not its verbal form; complete reiteration; dividing the utterance into phonetic units; and description of the written characters. These modes were related to age and to conventionality of characters used.

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