A study investigated the proposition that males have a predominant tendency to encode visually when reading, whereas females tend to encode phonologically. Arabic symbols were used to teach a group of 24 college students to "read." Subjects were assigned randomly to one of two conditions: learning the symbols as "letters" one by one with the aid of a tape, or learning the symbols in groups as "whole words," again with the aid of a tape. They were then asked to transfer the knowledge to "new" words containing the same elements. The findings indicated that males appeared to benefit more from word training whereas females benefited more from letter training in the transfer task. The findings suggest that when teaching reading to young children, a more visually oriented method might be more effective with boys and a less visual method might be more effective for girls. (HTH)