Thirty-one eight-year-old boys were the subjects of a study to determine the relationship between language skills in infancy and reading skills at elementary school age. As infants, the boys had been taped in interaction sessions with their mothers. The level of skill development of the infants was measured according to the principles of propositional construct and syntactic complexity proposed by Allen (1973). The eight-year-olds were administered the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests and the Gray Oral Reading Test. Subjects with Syntactic Complexity Scores and Percentage of Predicative Utterances at 30 months of age more than one standard deviation below the mean for the group were the poorest readers at age 8. The children whose spontaneous utterances at 30 months contained a larger number of different syntactic functions expressed by varying kinds of grammatical constructions, and who used a greater percentage of predicative utterances, were the better readers five years later. (JB)