Two tasks of word identification were proposed to children in their last year of upper preschool classes. The results show that identification is not based on an holistic processing but on an analytic one: some letters are enough, especially the first ones. Moreover, their order does not matter. During this period where reading is visuo-semantic in nature, children process letters as words properties. This kind of processing provides them with an "epilinguistic" knowledge about visual properties of the words, which is one of those precursors of decoding acquisition. (Contains 2 tables and 1 note.)