A total of 19 good and 19 poor readers participated in an examination of the extent to which first grade children who were successful beginning readers would exhibit better syntactic skills in auditory and reading tasks than would less successful readers. To isolate differences specifically related to sentence processing skills, the two groups were equated on a measure of nonverbal intelligence. Receptive auditory vocabulary and digit span were assessed so that these potential nonsyntactic effects could be partialled out statistically. Analysis of oral reading errors provided an assessment of context utilization during reading. Performance on an oral cloze task, judgment of grammaticality and correction of ungrammatical sentences, and a pictograph sentence memory task reflected sentence processing skills in nonreading situations. The results showed that relative to the good readers, poor readers displayed less effective utilization of sentence cues in the oral cloze task. Correlational analyses revealed that corrections of ungrammatical sentences related strongly for good readers with almost all other measures--intelligence, syntactic skills, and reading. (FL)