Teaching children to read letters first is regarded by many theorists as the foundation on which the teaching of words should be based. To test this assumption, 26 nursery school children were presented four items (two letters and two words) in a paired associate learning paradigm. The subjects were randomly divided into two groups for the purpose of determining what effects the speech names of letters and words have on the learning of the orthographic forms. The results indicated that written words were easier to learn than written letters and that meaning is a vastly more influential variable than visual perceptual complexity. These findings suggest that a good method of teaching reading would be one in which whole words are taught to the child, with the sound values of letters either learned by induction or taught at a later time. (RL)