A study examined the main and interacting effects of pragmatic, structural, and word-level manipulations of text on comprehension and compared the results to the effects of these variables on judgments of text comprehensibility and interest. Subjects were 120 seventh grade students who read a number of passages that differed in level of familiarity, "goodness" of structure, and vocabulary difficulty. The students either rated the comprehensibility of each passage or answered a number of comprehension questions based on each passage. Both comprehensibility judgments and comprehension performance were positively related to topic familiarity and good story structure. Vocabulary difficulty was negatively related to performance on the comprehension measure only. (Appendixes contain copies of the stories and the comprehension questions used in the study.) (Author/FL)