A random sample and a sample of retarded readers were selected from fourth- and sixth-grade students in the Grand Prairie Independent School District. All students were tested in the areas of auditory perception, visual perception, and phonics abilities. The tests administered were: two subtests from the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test; four subtests from the Detroit Tests of Learning Aptitude; the Wepman Auditory Discrimination Test; and the Bender-Gestalt (Watkins Scoring). The correlation between visual perception and phonics was significantly higher than the correlation between auditory perception and phonics; both were significantly different from zero. There was a significant difference in the means of the subgrouping of the retarded readers and the means of the random sample on the visual perception variable. Also the auditory subtests of the Detroit correlated negatively with the Wepman and the visual subtests of the Detroit correlated negatively with the Bender-Gestalt. An appendix contains a table of related research from 1893-1974. (Author/MB)