A study compared peripheral vision applied to letter-pair and Dolch word recognition. Subjects, 6 normal readers, 12 Chapter 1 students, and 34 learning disabled (and assumed dyslexic) students from grades one through three enrolled in a parochial school, a public school, and a university summer reading clinic, completed a test designed to estimate their reception speed of letters presented on a computer monitor at four different degrees of eccentricity (2.5, 5, 7.5, and 10 degrees). They were also tested on recognizing letter pairs and on recognizing Dolch words. Results indicated that (1) recognition ability falls off more sharply for Chapter 1 students at 7.5 and 10 degrees of eccentricity than it does for normal readers; (2) recognition ability of the learning disabled population drops less sharply than that of the Chapter 1 group from 7.5 to 10 degrees; and (3) Chapter 1 subjects do not markedly differ from the dyslexics in their foveal (fixation point) or peripheral vision. Findings suggest that improvements in reading achievement, specifically word recognition, may be facilitated by teaching dyslexics to read at the critical point where their letter and syllable identification is most accurate. (KEH)