A reading test and three cloze tests (English, health, and social studies passages with fifth/sixth grade readability levels) were administered to 410 ninth grade students to study the relationship between cloze errors and reading ability. Six types of incorrect responses were considered: synonymous, syntactically acceptable but semantically unacceptable, syntactically and semantically unacceptable, syntactically and semantically acceptable within the thought unit, nonstandard English or slang, and no response whatsoever. Significant differences were found in the mean number of correct responses by students with varying levels of reading ability (low, average, and high). When types of incorrect responses were examined, only the nonstandard English/slang errors were found to be not significant. All other types of incorrect responses produced significant differences across levels of reading ability. Synonym-type errors were associated with adequate reading ability, while most of the other types of errors were associated with low reading ability. The number of incorrect responses of each type (except for nonstandard English/slang) seemed to indicate a student's relative reading ability and the relative ease or difficulty of the material from which the cloze passage was taken. (RL)