Good and poor sixth grade readers served as subjects. Experiment 1 tested for immediate spatial order memory of letters by giving children four or six consonants and having them place the letters in the order in which they had appeared in a just-viewed stimulus. The consonants composing the strings were either positionally redundant (R) or nonredundant (NR) based on positional frequencies of letters in printed English. Poor readers were equal to good readers on four-letter strings, but inferior to good readers on both R and NR six-letter strings. Both reader groups were better in retrieving spatial order for R strings than for NR strings. Experiment 2 tested for immediate spatial order memory and immediate item memory for strings of eight digits and strings of eight consonants. Good readers were better than poor readers on all tasks. Performance on digits was better than performance with litters in both the order and the recall tasks for the two groups. The importance to the reading process of the poor reader short-term memory deficit for spatial order information is discussed in terms of recent evidence that positional redundancy is used to augment visual feature information in the identification of single letters. (Author)