Helen S. Cairns’s research while affiliated with The Graduate Center, CUNY and other places

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.

Twenty reading-disabled children, ages 7 through 10, were compared with 20 nondisabled readers of the same age range according to their ability to interpret complex sentences. Using a relatively new metric, subjects were classified according to Grammar Type and the extent to which they obeyed the c-command constraint on control in interpreting sentences containing embedded complements with missing subjects. The results demonstrated that the nondisabled readers performed at higher levels of grammatical development than did the reading-impaired subjects; there was no effect for age. Implications are made regarding the structural nature of the syntactic deficit in the reading-disabled population studied.