Children's well-developed oral language skills obviously facilitate their reading and learning to read. In contrast to a traditional position which contends that reading comprehension equals oral comprehension skills plus decoding, this paper claims that a child must learn (and, perhaps, unlearn) many more skills in the transition from oral comprehension to reading. In order to further delineate these skills, a dimensionalized space within which language experiences can be analyzed has been developed. The taxonomy implied by this space separates differences among language experiences into two major categories: those related to the medium or communicative channel and those related to the message itself. Comparing a child's oral language experiences (i.e., conversations) and the"goal" reading experience along these dimensions demonstrates clearly that the cognitive leaps we expect children to make in learning to read are enormous. Several consequences of this taxonomy for research and teaching are considered. As an example of the type of research question such an analysis might provoke, problems children might have in comprehending deictic terms (words whose meanings are sensitive to the time, place, and context of the utterance) in text are discussed. (Author)