Individual interviews and a series of ten tests were used to investigate the order in which children acquire reading concepts and demonstrate reading skills. Each of 44 first grade and 22 kindergarten students was tested and interviewed three times during the 1977-78 school year, and their responses were sorted and tabulated to determine whether each of 22 hypotheses should be accepted or rejected. The hypotheses considered the order of learning letters and words in spoken/written contexts and how concepts about books and reading attitudes were developed. Four conclusions were drawn from the study: knowledge of letter names is present among all children who learn to read words, whether the letter names are learned in school or before entering school. There is a stage in letter/word concept development during which a child believes that a word must be more than one letter. Children without the concept that print and not picture is read still are able to recognize words, but only those with the concept can actually read words. Some letter recognition ability may be prerequisite to performing satisfactorily on the Word Enumeration Task and to matching upper and lower case letters. (RL)