The study examines how level of reading acquisition is related to performance on word boundary tasks written at four differing readability levels. It also explores the validity of using word boundary tasks as measures of reading ability by comparing student performance on a word boundary measure to performance on both a cloze procedure task and on a word recognition task. Level of reading acquisition, level of passage readability, and grade placement of students were found to affect performance on the word boundary task. A multitrait-multimethod matrix of intercorrelations between the three measures showed that the word boundary task used for this study appeared to be a reliable and valid measure of reading performance for these subjects and that the three methods measure some of the same traits.
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