An account of the relationship of reading to language that depends on a distinction between primary linguistic activity itself--the processes of producing, perceiving, understanding, rehearsing, or recalling speech--and the speaker-hearer's awareness of this activity was proposed at a conference sponsored by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and entitled "Communicating by Language--The Relationships Between Speech and Learning to Read." Participants also considered what, besides competence in his native language, is necessary before the child can learn to read. If language is acquired through maturation rather than deliberately and consciously learned, linguistic awareness is not necessary. But reading is a secondary language-based skill, not a primary linguistic activity, and so requires a degree of linguistic awareness, particularly (for English) of morphophonemic segments. (TO)