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PASS refers to the cognitive process entailing planning, attention, simultaneous, and successive processing, which was proposed by Naglieri & Das(1988,1990). The purposes of the study were to investigate the cognitive process differences between regular children and children with reading disabilities and how such differences affect their language achievement. A total of 80 subjects, comprised of 40 regular children and 40 children with reading disabilities from fifth grade in 11 elementary schools in Taipei, participated in the study. They were tested by the "Test Battery of Children''s Cognitive Process" developed by the researcher and the "Test of Language Competence". The obtained data were analyzed by one-way MANOVA, discriminant analysis, Pearson correlation,and stepwise multiple regression. The major findings were as follows: 1. There were significant differences between the two groups in the "Test Battery of Children''s Cognitive Process", mainly in seven subtests,the special group was inferior to the regular group in "looking around", "filling the blank", "matching", "verbal relations", "pointing", "linguistic memory", "memory span". In terms of PASS, such differences were manifested in planning, simultaneous and successsive linguistic processing. In addition, PASS successfully discriminated these two groups.Using the twelve subtests,accuracy in discrimination reached to 87.5%; using the four cognitive processing, the accuracy in discrimination was 75%. Among them,simultaneous and successive linguistic processing and planing were especially powerful. 2. There was a significant relationship between PASS cognitive processing and performance in the "Test Battery of Language Competence"; the significant positive correlations were found between auditory memory and simultaneous processing,reading comprehension and successive processing/linguistic simultaneous processing; simultaneous processing and vocabulary detection/verbal selection, syntactic ability and simultaneous/successive processing. As a whole, the "Test Battery of Language Competence" was significantly correlated with simultaneous and successive processing. Stepwise multiple regression tests revealed the predictive power for language competence in the following order: language relation, vocabulary memory, memory span, and picture reasoning. In terms of PASS processing, successive processing had the strongest predictive power, followed by simultaneous processing. Limits of the research and its implications for educational administration,instruction and future research were discussed.
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