A study was carried out to discover if readers responded affectively to the connotative meanings of certain words and if better readers were more or less responsive to these connotations than were average or poor readers. A total of 120 students in five intact eleventh grade classes completed semantic differential scales to measure both individual and group levels of affective response to ten simulated newspaper interviews. The interviews contained either three positively connotative or three negatively connotative adverbs describing the manner of speaking of the person being interviewed. Analyses were made first of responses of the entire group and then of the responses of good, average, and poor readers. The findings revealed that students in all conditions responded with higher levels of affective response to the positive-version interviews. When the responses were rescored to determine the degree to which subjects responded positively to the positive versions and negatively to the negative versions, no significant differences were found among the three groups of readers, although the results did suggest that good readers were significantly more sensitive to the treatment effects then were poor readers. (Author/FL)