Research on comprehension and recall in reading has been limited in the past to quantitative studies of the amount of text items recalled. This paper reports on two experiments that used a qualitative measure in order to investigate the differences between fluent and less fluent comprehenders and the recall processes they use. The first experiment, involving 112 community college students and 48 Cornell University undergraduates, tested students' recall of two paragraphs, only one of which had explicitly stated logical and causal relations. Results indicated that the Cornell students were fluent readers, able to read even poorly written texts with good recall; the community college students were less fluent readers, who comprehended more when the text was well written, yet who still understood less than the fluent readers. The second experiment was designed to discover whether 32 randomly selected fluent and less fluent readers used different comprehension processes when reading. Results indicated that the comprehension processes used by each population were the same. The conclusion drawn from both experiments was that less fluent readers may not be deficient in comprehension at all, but rather may lack sufficient prior knowledge to allow comprehension to occur. (CC)