The basic purpose of this study was to determine the relation between word recognition and comprehension achieved when materials were read at various levels of readability. Also investigated were the lowest level of word recognition necessary to achieve a certain level of comprehension and the types of word recognition and comprehension errors made. The Informal Reading Inventory was administered to a random sample of 25 second and 25 fifth graders from three middle class metropolitan schools. Pearson product-moment coefficients of correlation were computed between word recognition and comprehension and were tested for significance. Tests of significance were also calculated among and between the correlations. These analyses revealed that no relation between word recognition and comprehension existed for second and fifth graders, except for fifth graders reading fifth grade material. Comparison of word recognition percentages revealed that most of the subjects needed to achieve a word recognition percentage of 98 or 99 in order to have an accompanying comprehension score of 70 percent. (Author/WR)