Carroll (1971) states that "... once the printed or written message is transformed into a representation of a spoken message, it becomes an object to be comprehended just as a spoken message is an object to be comprehended" (p. 133). In the present context, this means that, once reading decoding skills have been acquired and developed to the point of automaticity, reading is primarily a matter of languaging and conceptualizing. For this reason we expect that, even though children and adults may acquire considerable decoding skill, they will not necessarily perform well on a variety of reading tasks because of the language and conceptualizing demands of the tasks. It is a mistake, then, to believe that ". . .the 'reading problem' as we know it would not exist if, in dealing with language, all children could do as well by eye as they do by ear" (Kavanagh and Mattingly, 1972, p. 1). The fact of the matter seems to be that the great majority of school children do learn to language as well by reading as they do by auding-but large numbers of them cannot do too well by auding.

For instance, Sticht et al. (1972) found that 22% of men who entered the U.S. Army with mental aptitude scores between the 20th and 30th percentiles on the Armed Forces Qualification Test read below the sixth grade level, and hence may have suffered from some lack of decoding skill (see Chapter V, Hypothesis 1 for a discussion of "mature" reading in relation to school grade). However, some 50% read between the 6th and 10th grade levels. These levels of achievement seem to rule out major decoding problems and suggest, instead, ,that these men lack the broad range of vocabulary and conceptual knowledge required to perform at the 12th grade level or higher, even though most of them were high school graduates. In other research, Sticht (1968) found that a group of lower mental aptitude men were no better at comprehending messages presented in spoken form than they were in comprehending the same messages by reading.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, Reading Survey report indicates that a national sample of 17-year-olds and young adults performed quite well on reading tasks involving using visual aids (graphs, maps), following written directions, using reference materials, and getting significant facts from printed sources. However, tasks involving vocabulary knowledge, reading for main ideas, drawing inferences, and critical reading were poorly performed- especially by people from family backgrounds where the parents had no high school education. In these cases, less than 60% of the 17-year-olds correctly performed the latter set of reading tasks, while less than 65% of the young adults satisfactorily performed these reading tasks. Drawing inferences was tl1e most difficult of all tasks.