The present study involving two converging experiments tested the hypothesis that rapid, automatic processing of lexical items in a morphemic orthography (Chinese) is necessary, though not sufficient, for reading comprehension. The subjects consisted of 23 skilled adult comprehenders contrasted with 23 less skilled comprehenders. Experiment 1 was a vocalization latency task with 80 open class Chinese characters selected according to printed frequency (high or low) and orthographic structure (simple or complex). Analyses of variance of the vocalization latencies show significant main effects of reader ability, frequency, and structure and the greater contribution of low frequency, complex characters. Experiment 2 was a lexical decision task with another 40 open class Chinese characters similarly selected and matched with 40 pseudo Chinese characters. Analyses of variance of the lexical decision latencies show significant main effects of reader ability, lexicality, and structure and the greater contribution by pseudo characters. These results uphold the automaticity hypothesis and are generally confirmed by treating the items as random effects. The interaction of the various factors in the two experiments suggests their joint effects on the response or retrieval stage of accessing the Chinese lexicon.

The relationship between pragmatic referential communication skill and the cognitive ability to assess and assume another person's conceptual viewpoint was investigated in the autistic population. Ten high functioning autistic adolescents and young adults were matched for age and sex to normally developing controls and given referential communication and perspectivetaking tasks that had been previously demonstrated to be of comparable complexity. The groups were selected to be similar in terms of language skill. But despite their intact, elementary perspective-taking skills, the autistic subjects displayed significant communicative dysfunction. This suggests that factors other than a deficiency in the development of a "theory of mind" are significant contributors to the social communicative disorder associated with autism.

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This paper examines problems in the assessment of intelligence using standardized intelligence tests with culturally different children, for a sample of Canadian Inuit (Eskimo) children whose WISC-R scores, using the original WISC-R norms, would fall below a scaled score of 70. Ysseldyke and Algozzine (1982) identified three major reasons for a legitimate concern with bias in assessment, namely, that United States society evaluates a person's worth in terms of presumed intelligence, that different racial groups achieve different average intelligence test scores, and that there is a disproportionate minority student representation in special education classes. Addressing the inadequacy of models which have been developed to evaluate test fairness, the above authors concluded: "It is readily apparent that major measurement experts have been unable to agree on a definition of a fair test, let alone a test that is fair for members of different groups" (p. 130).Ysseldyke and Algozzine went on to say: "Abuse is evident in many areas related to the assessment of children and includes (1) inappropriate and indiscriminate use of tests; (2) bias in the assessment of handicapped children and in the identification as handicapped of children who are not; (3) bias throughout the decision-making process; and (4) bias following assessment" (p. 131). They emphasized that three characteristics -norms, reliability, and validity -determine the technical adequacy of tests. For many tests, evidence of reliability and validity is inadequate, and the assumption that the acculturation of the individual being assessed is comparable to that of the standardization group is false.The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children -Revised (WISC-R) (Wechsler, 1974) was standardized according to U.S. census information for the variables of age, sex, race, geographic region, urban-rural residence, and occupational group membership of the head of household, with the sample limited to "normal" children. Salvia and Ysseldyke (1985) noted that, whereas the reliability evidence