Has Vellutino Led Us Astray? A Rejoinder to a Reply

Abstract

V ellutino's rather lengthy reply to our paper is reminiscent of the 17th century philosopher Pascal's comment to a friend asking about his work: have made this letter rather long only because I have not time to make it shorter. To avoid similar excesses, our rejoinder will focus on the two purposes of our original response to Vellutino, Steger, Moyer, Harding, and Niles (1977): (1) to describe methodological and interpretive factors in the Vellutino et al. experiments, which limited the degree to which these studies refuted perceptual deficit hypotheses of reading disabilities; (2) to illustrate problems with research based on a paradigm hypothesizing that deficits between contrasting reading groups are explanatory of reading disabilities. Vellutino has clarified some of the methodological problems present in his published research, but he continues to misunderstand the impact of floor and ceiling effect in these studies. More importantly, issues pertaining to the second purpose of our rejoinder require additional commentary. In this rejoinder we will address (a) methodological factors, (b) perceptual discrimination processes in reading, (c) Vellutino's criticism of our research, and