The purpose of this study was to investigate to what extent the knowledge of letter names, letter sounds, or the combination of both facilitates the acquisition of word recognition ability. Forty-eight first graders were pretested and posttested on their knowledge of letter names and sounds, and measures of auditory and visual discrimination ability were obtained for each child. Treatments involved a control group and the teaching of letter names, letter sounds, and the combination of these. At the end of eight weeks the subjects were randomly reassigned to one of two methods groups (whole word or phonics). At the end of three weeks, all subjects were given the criterion measure, which was a list of 20 trigrams. Some of the results indicated that: training in letter names and sounds concurrently tended to have greater positive effect on the acquisition of word recognition skills; subjects who received letter name and sound training performed significantly better than any other gruop; letter names were easier to learn than letter sounds for all groups regardless of training; and phonic training seemed to be more effective than whole-word training. (Author/WR)