The development of certain cognitive skills to a certain level may be necessary to acquire beginning reading skills. A review of research on cognitive skill development and beginning reading revealed that only a few studies investigated the need for ascertaining the presence of some cognitive processing abilities before reading instruction is attempted. The cognitive skills that have been identified as relevant to reading are (1) perceptual and cognitive decentration, (2) conservation, (3) classification and class inclusion, (4) seriation, and (5) cognitive synthesis. A prereader should reach a point where these skills can be exercised on material that is presented only verbally or symbolically. In the case of remedial readers, lack of reading skills may be due not just to a lack of development of those skills specific to reading, such as word recognition, but to a lack of development of more basic cognitive or thinking skills. In a study to determine whether classification skills had developed to the same extent in adults who had reading problems as they had developed in adults who were normal readers, the results indicated that the normal readers were much more adept at classification tasks. Thus, it appears that a deficiency in acquiring certain cognitive skills can hamper reading and general literacy skills. (AEA)