“…From the experiments reviewed earlier on tasks similar to letter naming, it might be argued.that names would aid letter discrimination either by reducing the psychological similarity of the forms (Gagna & Baker, 1950), or by providing a.more retrievable representation of the letter than its figural representation provides (Spiker, 1956)-But these arguments become academic when it is observed that most children at the beginning of first grade can match letters of the alphabet successfully, yet can, on the average, name only about onethird of them. Nicholson . (1958), for example, found that for 2,188 children tested at the beginning of first grade in the Bo' 'on area, the mean number of lower-case letters matched successfully was 24.48, while at the same time the mean for naming lower-case letters for the same population was 9.00.…”