Abstract
Summary. Reading retarded children aged 8 to 12, whom previous research had shown to be deficient in their knowledge of pronominal reference rules, received oral presentations of sentences containing three kinds of adjective complements. In some the sentence subject was the logical subject of the dependent verb (S‐type: Mickey is happy to bite). In others the sentence subject was the logical object of the dependent verb (O‐type: Donald is easy to bite). There were also ambiguous sentences, interpretable as either S‐ or O‐ types (A‐type: Mickey is bad to bite). All age levels demonstrated knowledge of the S and O rules, and could apply either rule to the ambiguous sets. The difference in mean performance of retarded and normal readers was not significant, though there were fewer errorless performers among the retarded. The differences in knowledge of pronominal reference and adjective complements rules are explained in terms of the absence from the latter of surface structure cues reinforcing an initial incorrect rule.
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