In Piaget's dynamic conception of the child's cognitive growth, the transition from sensory-motor intelligence to the developmental stage of representational intelligence occurs during 5 to 7 years of age. The development proceeds from undifferentiation to differentiation, from unintentional to intentional, from unintelligent to intelligent, and includes cognitive processes beyond concrete experience that enables the child to master the ability to think symbolically. The symbolic functions are acquired through specialized development in accommodation and assimilation. The understanding of some of the principal characteristics of the child's cognitive orientation during the first 2 years in school could further success in reading and avoid possible reading failure. During this period, the sensory-motor ancestry still dominates the child's cognitive life with all the attributes postulated by Piaget: concreteness, centration, irreversibility, egocentrism, and transductive reasoning. All these attributes may more or less interfere with the child's learning in general and reading in particular, and may therefore disrupt his developmental process which concerns the totality of his structures of knowledge. References are included. (AW)