This volume grew out of the Seventeenth Annual University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Linguistics Symposium, which was held in Milwaukee on April 8-10, 1988. The theme of the conference was the relationship between linguistics and literacy. In this volume, a selection of papers are presented which cluster around three of the major themes that developed during the conference: the linguistic differences between written and spoken genres, the relationship between orthographic systems and phonology, and the psychology of orthography. The volume concludes with a solicited paper by Walter J. Ong which draws together the various strands considered in the other sections of the book and addresses the broader question of the social and psychological consequences of literacy.