two experiments exploring the role of individual words in reading comprehension are reported. in the first experiment one group of subjects processed text for comprehension and another attempted retention of text words. results showed that highter comprehension level can be accompanied by lesser knowledge of text words, and increased text word familiarity by decreased comprehension of the material. the second experiment presented subjects with a series of texts in which nouns representing the topic or "actor" were deleted. it's results showed that subjects can successfully fill-in such words and that the group showing superior performance in this task generated a significantly higher level of text comprehension than a comparable low performance group.