The nature of individual differences has long been of interest in the fields of education and psychology. In recent years, attempts to view individual differences within heterogeneous diagnostic categories have led to a number of new and productive approaches, particularly in the area of learning disabilities. Using Q-factor analysis and cluster analysis, researchers have found subtypes of learning disabilities. In each of these studies, subgroups were often characterized by language deficits. The present study extends the previous literature by identifying different subtypes of language disability within 55 six-and seven-year-old learning disabled children. Results, obtained with hierarchical cluster analysis, indicate that six language subtypes can be derived and that these arc both internally consistent and externally valid, being differentially linked to reading and math achievement over a 3-year period.

Reading-disabled children's language skills have long been implicated in their poor school performance. This study is a cross-sectional and longitudinal examination of the narrative language skills of both reading-disabled and normally achieving children in an attempt to understand more clearly the language processes involved in these skills and how these processes relate to reading achievement over time. Children were read scriptlike narratives and asked to demonstrate their knowledge of the story by a nonverbal enactment of the narrative. After perfect enactment of the story was assured, the children were asked to paraphrase the narratives. Results from both the cross-sectional and longitudinal study indicated that reading-disabled children comprehended the narratives in a comparable fashion to normal peers, but they performed more poorly on a variety of content and complexity measures derived from their paraphrases. The study indicates that reading-disabled children's language problems are persistent over time in the area of verbally expressing information, even when they have demonstrated nonverbal comprehension.

Longitudinal research in the area of learning disabilities has been lacking for some time. The study reported here is an attempt to chart the development of newly identified LD children over the early elementary school years while they are receiving LD services in the public school. This paper includes initial behavioral and academic data for a large sample of 6- and 7-year-old LD and normally achieving students, and charts the progress of about half the children over a 3-year period using teacher rating scales, a classroom observational system, and an achievement test. Results of the study over the three years show that LD children fall progressively further behind their normal peers in reading comprehension. In math, they stay relatively the same distance below their peers. The LD subjects' behavior relative to that of their peers is suboptimal for classroom learning in the first year of the study, with less on-task and more off-task behavior — a pattern which continues over the three-year period. This portrait of learning disabled children suggests that learning disabilities are difficult to remediate, and that we may need to rethink our pattern of services to these students if we want them to function successfully in the regular classroom.

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