Birch and Belmont (1964, 1965) have made important contributions to the study of reading development. Their hypothesis is interesting: that the ability to recognize equivalences between auditory-temporal and visual-spatial patterns is critically related to certain stages of reading development. The tesr which they devised [which we (1966) labeled the BB test] is in some respects ingenious and appropriate. We (Sterritt & Rudnick, 1966) called attention to several weaknesses in Birch and Belmont's methods and attempted to correct some of these deficiencies in an independent study. We object to Birch and Belmont's suggestions (1966) that our methods represent only a minor modification of their technique and that our finding exactly duplicate theirs. We devised rwo new tests (the instrumentation of which required about 4 mo. work), retaining the desirable features of their formar, in part to facilitate comparison of our work with theirs. Unlike their test, however, one of our tests is clearly entirely visual and one clearly requires cross-modal recognition of equivalences. Our data (1966) supported our criticism that the BB test does not tap cross-modal functioning, since our findings with the BB test resembled those with our purely visual test but did not resemble those with our cross-modal test. Birch and Belmont have protested (1966) that they had already reported (1965) no relationship of their test to reading in the fourth grade. The points we would like to make are that: (1) we did find a significant relationship of their test to reading; but in addition, (2) we demonstrated that this relationship was entirely attributable to intelligence; and (3) we found that the one of our tests which does require cross-modal perception relates to reading independently of inrelligence at the fourth grade. Thus, it seems to us that our methods and our findings depart significantly from rhose of Birch and Belmont's 1965 study. Birch and Belmont have not as yet acknowledged the possibility which our data (together with theirs) suggest, namely, that a purely visual perceptual factor (measured by the BB test) relates to reading early in reading development while a different perceptual factor (measured by our cross-modal test) becomes important later in reading development, along with, but independently of, the factor of general intelligence. This formulation is directly opposed to their arguments that the BB rest measures auditory-visual inregrarion and that the latter perceptual function declines in importance ro reading over Grades 1 to 4. We hope that this note will identify the ways in which we feel indebted to Birch and Belmont, while poinring up the differences, which we feel are very real, between their work and ours. We regret that these differences tended to be obscured in their (1966) note.