How soon does a child learn to discriminate orthographic units in his written language as distinguished from a general form-discrimination ability. A discrimination test of letters, words, or characters, in three written languages, Chinese, Hindi, and English, at three age levels, from four to five and a half years was given to 153 middle class children from three different countries, Formosa, India, and the United States. The predicted interaction between nationality and language subtests was significant only at the oldest level, from five to five and a half years. At this age, children in each country performed relatively better on the subtest in their native language than they did in the other two languages. No sex differences were obtained. (Author)