This study examines the effects of readiness level and learning modality emphasis on the form discrimination performance of kindergarten children on training and transfer tasks. Forty-eight male and 48 female kindergarten children between the ages of 5.5 and 6.5 years participated in the study. The children were randomly selected from a group of 109 children with high scores on the Metropolitan Readiness Test and from a group of 50 children with low scores. Four letter-like designs were presented to the subjects in haptic, visual, visual-haptic, and visual-verbal conditions. In the pre-training sessions, the distinctive features of these designs were described using one of the four modalities. In the training sessions, subjects were asked to identify one of the designs from a set of two. In the transfer sessions, the subjects were asked to identify the designs which were embedded in noise backgrounds. Results were analyzed through a three-way (modality by readiness by sex) analysis of variance. The results suggest that readiness level has some bearing on learning modality preference. Some sex differences in learning modality preference were also found. (BD)