Strategies children use when they recognize words were explored. To measure the effectiveness of two different methods of training children to attend to the critical features of letters, 40 first-grade urban children were presented two pairs of letters (similar and dissimilar) simultaneously or successively. Unexpectedly, it was found that with highly similar stimuli (b and d) the successive problem was less difficult than the simultaneous problem; while with dissimilar stimuli (s and b) the successive presentation was more difficult. Due to this finding, a more complex experiment which combined highly similar letters into trigrams was carried out with 48 first-grade children. Similar results were obtained as in the first experiment. From two additional studies it was found that children with some reading training used the initial and then the final letter of a word as the most important cues in word recognition. A study of the cues used by young children in identifying a word aurally revealed that the final and the initial consonant syllables were chosen more frequently than any of the given five cues. It was also shown by this study that visual word recognition experimental techniques are feasible in studying the aural modality. References are included. (DH)