In order to test hypotheses derived from the concept that grammatical, syntactic, semantic, and contextual cues affect the degree of reading comprehension in a visual display, the present investigation was undertaken using the French language. The subjects were approximately 30 college students in a second-semester elementary French course. Five sentences were constructed for each of four sentence types (active declarative, active interrogative, negative, and negative interrogative); each of the five sentences in each group was given a different degree of visual clarity or blurring by making multiple carbon copies on a typewriter. The dependent variable was the point of clarity at which grammaticality and sentence meaning were clearly recognized. Subjects were given a short review of sentence types and were asked to indicate at what point of clarity they understood each sentence and its type. The results suggest that recognition of grammatical type and its underlying declarative and/or interrogative features provides a powerful cue in reading even when perceptual processing is obscured. The finding that declarative sentences require less time to evaluate than negative sentences has theoretical implications for future research. (MSE)