First grade students practiced reading ten unfamiliar function words; half studied the words embedded in printed sentences and half studied the words in unstructured lists and then listened to sentences comprised of the words. Posttest measures revealed that those who studied the sentences learned more about the syntactic/semantic identities of function words, whereas those who studied the lists remembered the orthographic identities of the words better and could pronounce the words faster and more accurately in isolation. The findings show that there are multiple aspects of printed words to be learned by beginning readers, and that the aspect that gets learned depends upon how the words are practiced. These results lend support to the theory of printed word learning in which various identities of words become amalgamated in lexical memory as a consequence of reading experiences with the words. (Author/FL)