To assess the extent to which syntactic and semantic information guides the reading performance of skilled and less-skilled readers in the intermediate grades, a study was conducted involving 96 fourth, fifth, and sixth grade students. The students were matched both within and across grade level on nonverbal IQ and within each grade level on age. The skilled and less-skilled reading groups were also matched on reading achievement across grade. Each student's oral reading was individually tested on two types of task: the cloze procedure and transformed text. The extent to which the syntactic and semantic constraints of the text guided their performance was then assessed. Both on the cloze procedure and the transformed texts, skilled readers made greater use of grammatical and contextual information than did less-skilled readers. In addition, there was minimal improvement across grade levels in the proportions of syntactically and semantically appropriate responses. The stability of differences between skilled and less-skilled readers suggested the possibility that differential utilization of syntactic and semantic cues by beginning readers might contribute to differences among them in the development of reading skill. (Author/FL)