I disagree with the following explanation about why we know so little about the reading abilities of high school graduates and their knowledge of grammar.   Craig writes:

    If students don't read well, is that at least partly because of 
grammar? I think so, but we haven't looked closely at that because the 
prevailing view has been that the grammar is already there or will 
arrive on its own.

***
The reason "we" haven't looked closely is because there are very few reading courses in the post-secondary educational system. As a consequence, there is very little interesting in figuring out how such people read.  

[I looked at a recent issue of the Handbook of Reading and noticed the absence of research on adults.  At best, you will find summaries on study habits.]

On the other hand, because we expect everyone to be literate, there is support for research on the acquisition of reading.

My sense is that many of those researchers interested in reading don't have a very good understanding of the nature of language and don't have a very good theory of interpretation.

For example, all of the major reading scales count words/syllables with the assumption that shorter is easier. That is problematic on two counts.

One, deletions can require more knowledge of the language than full sentences.  Although (1) is shorter than (2), I would argue (1) is hard to process because it requires recognizing that the relative clause is not overtly marked.

1) There is the woman Charlie kissed.
2) There is the woman who Charlie kissed.

Second, some constructions are more difficult to process than others.  Consider heavy subject noun phrases as on such construction.  Although both (3) and (4) are the same length, I would suggest (4) is more difficult to process because of the subject.

3) I saw the woman who kissed Charlie.
4) The woman who kissed Charlie saw me. 

Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri 

Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri

Craig

Spruiell, William C wrote:
> I ran across the following in ScienceDaily today. It's the kind of research result for which I'd really, really want to see multiple followup studies. The researchers found that a proportion of their (adult) test subjects couldn

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