The transfer relationships between three tasks used in the Southwest Regional Laboratory's (SWRL) First-Year Communications Skills Program to help the child recognize the relationship between isolated letter sounds and the same sounds embedded in a word context were investigated. The three tasks were learning isolated letter sounds, learning sounded-out (phonemically segmented) words, and learning whole words. The subjects were 96 children attending prekindergarten and kindergarten sessions. Each subject was randomly assigned to one of eight groups. Three lists (whole words, sounded-out words, and isolated letters) were presented to each of the eight groups. The results ranked the degree of transfer to be expected between words and word components. The greatest amount of transfer was obtained between isolated letter sounds and sounded-out words; the next largest amount of transfer was obtained between sounded-out words and whole words. In general, the results showed that learning the sounded-out words is a very useful pivot task because there was considerable transfer from this task to both isolated letter sounds and whole words while there was little, if any, direct transfer between the latter two tasks. References are included. (Author/NH)