Examines some historical facts surrounding Thorndike's 1917 article, Reading as Reasoning: A Study of Mistakes in Paragraph Reading," (republished in Reading Research Quarterly, 1971, 6, 425-48), in an attempt to put the article in its proper perspective both as a research study and as a contribution to the psychology of reading. (VJ)

Investigates second grade children's ability to understand the use of deictic terms (devices in language that convey information about the communicative situation) in three types of tasks: oral language, written language, and picture selection, and concludes that the difficulty of a word with deictic content depends largely upon the discourse…