A study examined hierarchical relationships among three developmental components of reading ability in grades 1 through 3. It was predicted that semantic skills develop initially, followed by letter identification skills, phonological skills, and visual skills. Reading ability was assessed with a word identification task. The semantic components of reading were assessed with word definition tasks, phonological skills were measured with rhyming tasks, and visual graphic skills were tapped with a letter naming task. Hierarchical relationships among performances on tasks were examined as they characterize the acquisition of reading for beginning readers. Children were tested individually, and all responses were recorded as pass or fail. The results showed that children performed most accurately and correctly on verbal definition and picture tasks, scoring at ceiling levels in all grades. Their performance was successively less accurate on letter identification, rhyming production, and reading production, particularly for first and second grade students. The results suggest that most beginning readers acquire reading skills in a hierarchical order most of the time. The findings also show the relevance of visual graphics and phonological skills to reading development--most children who consistently failed visual graphics and phonolgoical tasks tended to experience difficulty in oral reading performance and to read below grade level in class. (HTH)