Abstract. In recent years, much research has been engendered concerning sensory modality functioning and its relationship to the reading process. The approaches to studying sensory modality preferences and its relationship to individual learning patterns have been numerous. The present review is designed to integrate the research findings on modal preferences, to attempt to arrive at some reasonably sound principles through a systematic synthesis of the literature, and to suggest some areas in need of further research.The question of how people differ in the rate, style, and quality of learning is one which has concerned psychologists and educators for almost a century. The fact that individuals differ along any continuum is rarely disputed, yet this fact is often ignored in psychological research designed to generate general laws of learning (Newsom, Eischens, and Looft, 1972). Discrepancies in group and individual learning curves have been formally presented by Sidman (1952) who demonstrated mathematically that the shape of the mathematical function based on the average learning curves of a group is not necessarily the same as the learning curve for an individual. The notion that individual differences merely arise from error deviations about some mythical average is no longer acceptable (