Forty-four second grade students participated in a study examining the relationships between field dependence/independence (FDI), grammatical awareness, reading ability, and training in grammatical awareness. After the children were pretested for their levels of cognitive development, degree of field independence, grammatical awareness, and reading ability, they were ranked according to FDI level and randomly assigned to either a treatment group, which was given tasks that required manipulation of grammatical elements in some way, or a control group in which the children played games involving phonics and spelling. After 7 weeks of treatment, the students were measured again for grammatical awareness and reading ability. The results indicated that a child's reading performance is strongly affected by level of cognitive development, how field independent the child is, and the extent to which the child is able to use knowledge of grammatical structure while reading. Given the same level of cognitive development, children with more grammatical awareness were better readers than children with less grammatical awareness. Cognitive style was a factor in the acquisition of grammatical awareness, with field-independent children having higher levels of grammatical awareness than field-dependent children. There were no significant differences between the experimental and control groups on any of the pretest or posttest measures. (RL)