Recent research in phonological disorders has focused on phonological processes, to determine the number of children using particular processes. This study investigated individual patterns of phonological process occurrence in nine phonologically disordered children. The purpose of the study was to determine frequency of occurrence of each process for each child and frequency of occurrence of unusual processes. Results indicated that a small, basic subset of phonological processes seemed to account for the majority of errors made by these children. Unusual processes were primarily changes in word structure. Within the common framework of basic and unusual processes, the children realized the processes in unique ways.

Two studies evaluated the interhemispheric transmission deficit explanation of reading disability comparing second- and sixth-grade poor and normal readers on learning and discrimination tasks that involved hemifield presentations of visual stimuli. In the first of these studies, in the main poor readers performed below the level of normal readers on paired associates learning, regardless of the visual field in which the stimulus appeared, thereby replicating previous findings. In the second study, no differences between reader groups were found on time taken to indicate presence or absence of a simple dot stimulus. It was concluded from the combined results that deficiency in inter-hemispheric transmission is not a significant cause of reading disability.

Since children with reading disability are known to have problems using a phonetic memory strategy, it was expected that their recall of order would be inferior to that of good readers in situations where a phonetic strategy is optimal, i.e., when temporal order recall, but not necessarily spatial order recall, is required. On separate tests for retention of temporal sequence and spatial location, the good readers were better than the poor readers on the temporal order task as expected, but contrary to expectation, they maintained their superiority on the spatial task as well. Nevertheless, differences in the error patterns of the good and the poor readers are supportive of earlier evidence that links poor readers' short-term memory deficiencies to reduced effectiveness of phonetic representation.

Learning disabled (LD) children in the role of interviewer have been found to be less skilled than nondisabled children at initiating and sustaining a dialogue with a classmate. This study tested the effects of modeling on these conversational skills and on metaconversational knowledge. LD and nondisabled boys in grades 2 through 8 listened to either a dialogue of a child interviewer modeling open-ended questions, conversational devices and contingent comments and responses, or a monologue presenting only the interviewee's responses. Each subject was then videotaped interviewing a classmate. Although the dialogue model increased LD children's production of open-ended questions and comments, these strategies appeared more difficult for their listeners to understand and expand. Results of the metaconversational responses suggest that LD children are aware of their difficulties in conversational interaction.