To determine the relation between prereaders' abilities to integrate sensory information and reading achievement, 4 matching tasks, involving visual (V) and auditory (A) dot-dash patterns were given to 119 Ist-grade Ss in September. The tasks included V-V, V-A, A-V, and A-A matching. School-administered tests included IQ, readiness, and end-of-year reading. Extreme reading groups were selected and matched in IQ. Multiple-regression analyses using extreme groupreading performance as the criterion showed that: (a) When the 4 matching tasks were used as predictors, A-V and V-A tasks made significant contributions to predicting reading, and (b) When the 4 matching tasks were combined with reading-readiness subtests only letter naming made a significant contribution. The relation between A-V matching and letter naming was examined and implications discussed.

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This study compared 3 groups of kindergarten children (49 Ss in all) in learning names for the letters "b" and "d." An Attention-Consistent Motor (A-CM) group received pretraining in attending to the directional difference between the letters and making consistent motor responses to each letter. An Attention-Inconsistent Motor (A-IM) group received similar attention pretraining, but made inconsistent motor responses to each letter. An Irrelevant-Control (Ir-C) group received attention and motor response pretraining to color stimuli. Performance of the 3 groups on the letter-naming transfer task showed the 2 attention groups superior to the control group. No significant performance differences were associated with the motor response variable.Developmental studies (Gellerman, 1933;Rice, 1930) indicate that young children discriminate form at an earlier age than they respond to changes in orientation or inversions of plane figures. Newhall (1937) found there were differences in discrimination performance associated with types of inversions. He showed that children observed up-down inversions consistently as early as 3 years of age. The left-right inversion, by contrast, was responded to inconsistently as late as 5 years. Davidson's (1935) findings with letter inversions were similar in trend to Newhall's. Davidson reported that up-down inversions illustrated by "q" and "d" were discriminated by more than 50% of the kindergarten-aged children. At the same age, left-right inversions, illustrated by "b" and "d", were discriminated by less than 10%.

Reports seven-year followup study of 56 Ss to assess contributions of first-grade skills to subsequent reading performance. The Harrison-Stroud Reading Readiness Profiles and WISC were administered to 5s early in first grade to form a pool of 19 skill tests. Multiple regression analyses were used to screen the skill tests to arrive at a set of independent and significant reading predictors. Results showed that two slightly different sets of skills emerged as short-and long-term predictors. In grade one and two, the ability to understand that printed words stand for ideas and the ability to make visual discriminations were important. Information background and reasoning ability emerged as significant predictors for the long term beginning in second and third grades. The ability to name letters proved a significant and independent predictor at every grade level. An analysis of the relationship of letter naming to other skills revealed that letter-naming ability in early first grade was related to a variety of skills involved in the reading process including sensory and intellectual skills. Related research suggested that individual differences in letter-naming performance in kindergarten and early first grade may reflect, in part, maturational differences among children.