The problem of retardation in reading has been attacked from various angles. Extreme cases have usually been used for investigation. Diagnosis has been based on objective tests which measure the degree of skill acquired at certain stages of progress. Attempts have been made to understand the causes of deficiencies by the measurement of eye-movements, of perception spans, and of attention factors. The fact still remains that even in the later elementary-school grades some children are retarded in reading, not as a result of congenital word-blindness or mental or perceptual defectiveness, but because of failure to acquire the proper mental habits in reading. The hypothesis of the study described in this article was that these readers are deficient in the mental processes required for forming relationships and associations or for discriminating between meanings. It was expected that, through a comparison of two groups of readers, one group of superior readers and the other of retarded readers, a more complete method and technique of diagnosis might be developed and that, through an analysis of this comparison of performance, further guidance in remedial training might be given. The ensuing material is based on a year's study of two groups of readers in Grade VII of the Tappan Junior High School, Ann Arbor, Michigan, which was made during the school year 1930-31. The chief criterion for division of the pupils in this grade was retardation in reading. Pupils having a reading grade below the standard, 7.0, were placed in Group II; those superior or above the standard, in Group I. The Sangren-Woody Reading Test and the Gates Silent Reading Tests were used to determine reading grades and also to determine the medians for the two groups. At the beginning of the study the reading grade for Group I was 8.8 in the Sangren-Woody test and io.o in the Gates test: for Group II the median was 6.5