A study investigated whether fluency in oral reading, as indicated by proper intonation, could be used as a measure of college students' reading comprehension. The study was designed to look at the three features of intonation--pitch, stress, and juncture--separately and in combination to determine whether any one or a combination of all the features could be used to assess reading comprehension. The subjects were 54 black West Indian college students whose first language was English. These students read orally two reading passages into a cassette tape player. The tapes of these readings were analyzed for characteristics of intonation. Two weeks after the oral readings, the subjects completed two cloze tests based on the two reading passages. The seven null hypotheses that were investigated in this study yielded consistent evidence that the three features of intonation (pitch, stress, and juncture) were not related to reading comprehension, when viewed either separately or in combination with one another. The results clearly and consistently indicated that measures other than the use of proper intonation must be used to assess reading comprehension. (Appendixes contain materials used during the research, including a word recognition test, the two reading passages, a key to intonation of the passages, and the cloze tests for the passages.) (RL)