A study was conducted to investigate the relationships between the cognitive variables of cognitive style, understanding of linguistic concepts, and knowledge of word boundaries, as well as their relationships to three measures of reading in beginning and more advanced readers. The children's Embedded Figures Test, a linguistic concept test, a word boundary test, and an individual reading inventory were administered to 35 first grade and 31 third grade children. Correlations, multiple linear regression analyses, and commonality analyses were used to analyze the data. The results indicated a substantial relationship between the predictor and criterion variables at the first grade level; however, the relationships were considerably weaker at the third grade level. Linguistic concept knowledge contributed the greatest amount of unique variance to oral comprehension, silent comprehension, and word recognition at the first grade level. At the third grade level linguistic concept knowledge contributed the greatest amount of unique variance to oral comprehension and word recognition, while cognitive style contributed the greatest amount of unique variance to silent comprehension. (Author/RL)