This paper reports investigations of the extent to which novice readers (Grades 1 and 3) and adult readers used different types of letter‐sound units when reading aloud. Although differences in performance of children and adults were observed, all age groups used grapheme‐phoneme units more frequently than they used bodies. Both children and adults were better at reading nonwords constructed from real word‐bodies than at reading nonwords whose bodies did not exist in English words, except that Grade 1 children derived significantly less benefit from word bodies than did older readers. Word reading accuracy showed that these differences between Grade 1 and older readers were not attributable to unfamiliarity with the words containing the body units. Beginning readers can apply grapheme‐phoneme correspondences by the end of Grade 1. Their skills improve so that accuracy in reading monosyllabic nonwords in Grade 5 is only slightly below adult performance. The contribution of body‐level units increases from Grade 2 onwards, and is likely to be due to expansion of the orthographic inpu