Abstract
Reading teachers and researchers have frequently assumed there is Some relationship between the syntactic structure of language and the reading acquisition process. Indeed, most methods for teaching reading are implicitly built upon assumptions about the interactions between language and reading behaviors. Often the findings of linguists can be used to suggest the nature of the relationship described above. Illustrated in this paper are different sentences which can be transformed in such a way that each has the same surface structure (typographic appearance) as the others, but which do not have the same meanings (deep structure). The paper illustrates why sentences which have various different meanings implicit in their syntactic structure would be difficult for beginning readers to understand.