The writing of learning disabled college students was examined to account for their difficulty with grammatical structure. Junior college students of average intelligence who were enrolled in a program for the learning disabled volunteered as subjects. A sample of writing was taken together with a parallel oral sample. Additional parallel tasks designed to measure both linguistic and orthographic components of the writing process were administered as well.
Grammatical acceptability in the written sample correlated significantly with that of two other tasks --sentence transcription and the spoken sample, which were themselves also significantly correlated. Common factors underlying this three-way task relationship among the written sample, sentence transcription, and the spoken sample tasks were explored by analyzing differences in performance between two subgroups of subjects formed on the basis of their performance on the written sample. Both linguistic and orthographic demands were found to be related to the grammatical problems in the writing of these students. The increasing level of demand on verbal short-term memory seemed to play a role in the decrease in level of grammatical acceptability for the three related tasks. Teaching approaches should strengthen skills and reduce the processing load during writing.