Abstract
The purpose of the study was to investigate the relationship between cognitive synthesis abilities and reading abilities in young children. Forty/kindergarten-age children were tested in a cognitive synthesis task involving logographs or whole-word symbols. Half of the children were readers, and half were not. Since the children were equally unfamiliar with the symbols, readers had no initial advantage over non-readers. All of the children demonstrated their verbal comprehension of the vocabulary words represented by the logographs. All were able to learn which word went with each symbol. However, a significant difference was found between children who read and non-readers in the ability to integrate logographs arranged in sentence form. Readers were better able to synthesize information in sentences than were non-readers.