ABSTRACTA longitudinal study investigated the relationship between cognitive abilities at age four and reading at age seven. Reading ability was significantly positively correlated with knowledge of grapheme‐phoneme correspondence, visual memory, auditory sequential memory, and Draw‐a‐man scores (intelligence). Once age (20ro) and intelligence (12%) were partialled out, auditory sequential memory scores at age four accounted for 13% of the variance in reading scores with visual sequential memory scores predicting a further 5%. Implications of results are disc