Fluency and Comprehension 1 Running head: RELATIONSHIPS OF READING FLUENCY TO COMPREHENSION Relationships of Three Components of Reading Fluency to Reading Comprehension

This study examined the relationships of three levels of reading fluency, the individual word, the syntactic unit, and the whole passage, to reading comprehension among 278 fifth graders heterogeneous in reading ability. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that reading fluency at each level related uniquely to performance on a standardized reading comprehension test in a model including inferencing skill and background knowledge. The study supported an automaticity effect for word recognition speed and an automaticity-like effect related to syntactic processing skill. Additionally, hierarchical regressions using longitudinal data suggested that fluency and reading comprehension had a bidirectional relationship. The discussion emphasizes the theoretical expansion of reading fluency to three levels of cognitive processes and the relations of these processes to reading comprehension