The present study was designed to investigate whether a good reader, by the fifth grade, will have attained sufficient knowledge of the language structure to enable him to more exactly and more appropriately reconstruct mutilated texts than a poor reader, matched for verbal intelligence level. Four 250-word cloze-treated passages were administered to twelve deficient and twelve non-deficient sixth grade readers, matched according to sex and the verbal portion of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children. Analyses of variance failed to show any significant differences between good and poor readers except for a weak indication that good readers produced more exact replacements.