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It should be contentious to consider a subsystem of reading called “reading comprehension.” If learning to read words unlocks the resources of spoken language comprehension, then anything special about reading ends at word identification. “The Simple View of Reading” (Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990) expresses this assumption and continues to accumulate evidence (Catts, 2018; Hjetland et al., 2020; Lonigan et al., 2018; Nation, 2019). Moreover, reading comprehension builds on spoken language experience. Preschool measures of oral language predict school‐entry indicators of word level skills that predict later comprehension skills (Hulme et al., 2015).

Nevertheless, comprehension is a distinctive subsystem of reading, even if it derives from general language comprehension. Moreover, excluding reading comprehension as part of reading would ignore the largest body of research on skilled comprehension. Much of what is known about language comprehension – including such basic aspects as sentence comprehension – comes from reading research (see Liversedge et al., this volume).

Whereas word identification operates with a restricted set of knowledge sources (graph forms (e.g., letters), phonology, and morphology), comprehension operates with every knowledge source one can imagine. To simplify the resulting complexity, we refer to the RSF comprehension subsystem, extracted here as Figure 1.3.

The lexicon plays a pivotal role. The output of the word‐identification system, the word’s pronunciation and meaning features, is the input to the comprehension system. A word’s meaning is directly integrated into ongoing comprehension and its pronunciation helps secure the word’s identity, thus supporting processes of structure building, integration, and, when needed, repair.

Figure 1.3 The comprehension system of the Reading Systems Framework.