25Although previous studies have demonstrated that syntacticawareness is related to beginning reading achievement, the direction of causation remains a matter of dispute. Our study employed a reading level design in which good, younger readers were matched with poor, older readers on four measures of reading ability (real word recognition, pseudo-word naming, reading fluency, and reading comprehension) and verbal intelligence. It was found that the good, younger readers scored significantly better than the poor, older readers on two measures of syntacticawareness, one an oral doze task and the other an oral correction task. The findings suggest that the older, poor readers weredevelopmentally delayed in syntacticawareness and that this delay may have retarded reading development.The ability of young children to produce the missing words in visually or orally presented sentences is related to their reading comprehension performance (Bickley et al., 1970;Perfetti & Roth, 1981;Ryan & Ledger, 1984). However, the word recognition ability of good readers while processing sentences is less dependent on prior context than that of poor readers (Stanovich, 1982a). It appears that the superior decoding skills of the better readers makes reliance on contextual information largely unnecessary. Perfetti et al. (1979) found that skilled readers who displayed smaller context effects in a word recognition task were nevertheless better than less skilled readers at using context to predict words in written and oral doze tasks. The correlation between word recognition performance and number of correct predictions was 0·60. This raises the question, however, of why better predictive abilities are associated with greater reading proficiency.One possibility is that the poorer performance of less skilled readers on doze tasks is a consequence of their difficulty in learning to read. Having successfully learned to read, good readers receive greater exposure to written language. This in turn results in the development and practice of their verbal abilities, rendering them superior to less-skilled readers on tasks involving verbal materials. Another possibility, which is investigated in this study, is that the doze task constitutes a measure of syntactic awareness and that this ability is causally related to learning to read.By syntactic awareness we mean the child's ability to reflect upon and to manipulate aspects of the internal grammatical structure of sentences. It is one of several general types of metalinguistic ability, a developmentally distinct kind of linguistic functioning which emerges during middle childhood and which is thought to be related to the more general changes in information-processing capabilities that occur during this period (Hakes et al

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