Summary.An examination was made of the ‘actions’ of early reading—analysis and synthesis—within the modalities of sound alone and sound with sight. The relative difficulty of these skills for a sample of forty 5 and 6‐year‐old children was established through an assessment of their performance of four different tasks of analysis or synthesis involving four word lists of equal difficulty. Purely auditory synthesis was found to be considerably easier than any other skill; analysis involving both sound and sight was found to be by far the mos