The extent to which children of two age levels use visual or name codes in recognizing similarities and differences between short words was studied. Subjects were presented with a word for .5, 1.0, or 1.5 seconds, followed immediately by a second word, and were instructed to press a key indicating whether or not the two words had the same name. Word pairs were of three types: physical identity (same word, same case), same name (different case), or different. Older subjects responded more quickly overall and all subjects seemed to rely heavily on visual information at all time intervals. It was suggested that reading experience may influence visual information processing as age increases. (Author)