This study investigated the effect on the reading comprehension of preschool children of matching syntactic patterns in written materials to patterns in their level of language acquisition. It also examined whether a language experience method or a prescribed vocabulary method had different effects on the results. Eighty randomly selected subjects between the ages of two years and six years, five months, were randomly assigned to either the experimental (younger, base structure language stage) or the control group (older, pronoun reference language stage). Each group was randomly subdivided into the two method groups. Each child was instructed with sets of reading materials, one using base structures and the other using pronoun reference structures. At the end of four days of instruction, each child was tested for his ability to read sentences from both language stages and to appropriately manipulate toys for the sentence read. The experimental group did learn to read structures which were within their present language acquisition stage and did not learn to read structures which were not. But the control group also did significantly better on the earlier language acquisition than on the later acquisition. The method had no effect at all. (TO)