This paper is based on a transactional viewpoint (involving writer, reader, and text) in which the text is no longer external but is constructed and reconstructed by the reader during reading. Using a database developed for a previous study (Goodman and Goodman, 1978), this research examined pronoun usage in three basal texts by evaluating the miscue patterns of 24 second graders, 32 fourth graders, and 32 sixth graders. These students represented eight populations made up of four English dialect groups from Tennessee, Maine, Mississippi, and Hawaii, and four bilingual groups from Arizona (Navajo), Michigan (Arab), Texas (Spanish), and Hawaii (Samoan). Analysis of readers' miscue patterns indicated that they established pronoun referents in the personal texts they created as they read. Results showed that pronouns were read without miscues over 90% of the time. Key findings included the following: (1) many text pronouns were read with few or no miscues, though others revealed identical substitutions by several subjects, indicating their shift to a different referent; (2) pronouns were substituted for other text words in rough proportion to their occurrence in the text; (3) readers tended to substitute pronouns with other pronouns from the same grammatical case, thus maintaining syntactic function and anticipating where pronouns would occur in noun positions; (4) non-pronoun substitutions occurred in few categories, indicating that readers expected pronouns in certain text positions; (5) determiners were frequently interchanged with possessives, indicating the maintenance and possible intensification of cohesive relationships; (6) miscue patterns involving conjunctions and pronouns indicated the reader's manipulation of the surface structure using different options than the author. (JD)