Researchers investigating the cerebral information processing of visual stimuli have usually followed the pattern of stimulating the subject's eyes with light and observing accompanying changes in brain wave patterns. Such visually evoked responses (VERs) have been found to discriminate bright from dull children and dyslexic from normal readers. Research in this area has also shown that "familial reading dysfunction" subjects (those who are retarded in reading even though they are normal in other respects) have an inverted right occipital lobe VER with respect to their posterior midline VER. A study was conducted to determine if children with inverted VERs were different from children with normal VERs with respect to the types of errors made in recognizing isolated words. Subjects, 20 inverted VER children and 11 normal VER children, completed a number of tests designed to measure listening comprehension, intelligence, word recognition, and oral and silent reading ability. Results showed that the inverted VER children made more omissions and irrelevant substitutions while recognizing isolated words than did the normal VER children. In addition, the normal VER children substituted significantly more words with the same beginning letter or sounds, suggesting that they were more systematic in their word attack procedures. (FL)