--- - |2 The N1 effect is an electrophysiological marker of visual specialization for print. The phonological mapping hypothesis (Maurer & McCandliss, 2007) posits that the left‐lateralized effect reflects grapheme‐phoneme integration. In this event‐related potential study, first (age = 7.06 years, N = 32) and third‐grade readers (age = 9.29 years, N = 28) were presented with pairs of pseudowords and Armenian character strings in a novel implicit same‐different paradigm. To test the phonological mapping hypothesis, stimuli were presented in visual‐only and audiovisual conditions. The results demonstrated that tuning for print already emerges in first grade. Moreover, the parallel presentation of auditory stimuli enhanced the N1 effect suggesting a role of orthographic‐phonological mapping in the development of specialization for print. - Child Development, EarlyView.