In light of conflicting and limited results in the assessment of the effects of text-forming structures, a study investigated the effects of specific microlevel and macrolevel text-forming elements on readers' comprehension of selected passages of scientific technical prose. More specifically, the study examined the individual and combined effects of intersentential cohesive conjunctions, reference, lexical cohesion, and rhetorical predicates on college freshmen's comprehension (free recall and reading rate) of these passages. Subjects for the experiment were 160 students in freshman composition classes. Each subject read one of 16 versions of texts dealing with fairly technical scientific topics. During the 12 data gathering sessions, subjects were asked to read the passages at their normal reading rates, record their reading times, and write as much as they could recall of the passage. Analyses of the data revealed no systematic effects of intersentential cohesive conjunctions, reference, lexical cohesion, and rhetorical predicates on reading rate and written free recall. These findings appear to support the argument that surface level linking structures are not causes but symptoms or reflections of the underlying coherence of connectivity of text-knowledge and world-knowledge. (RL)