Abstract

This article responds to Burleson and Rowan's (1985) discussion of the relationship between social-cognitive ability and writing skill. A study is reported in which 49 9-year-old children completed a social-cognition task, wrote four compositions (literary/narrative, expressive, referential, and persuasive), and produced oral messages. Correlational analyses showed that social-cognitive ability was most strongly related to the oral task (r = .37), weakly related to the literary/narrative task (r = .25), and very weakly (nonsignificantly) related to performance on the other writing tasks.