Arguing that skilled reading is the result of the successful acquisition of a number of highly automatic component processes that operate together in an integrated manner, this paper describes a series of studies of good and poor high school readers representing three general domains of processing: decoding, analyzing and comprehending text, and integrating contextual and perceptual information in encoding words and phrases. The paper discusses three types of interactions occurring within the framework of these processing domains: bottom-up, top-down, and sequential. Among the conclusions of the studies reported are that (1) young adult readers who differ widely in skill as measured by a standardized test of reading comprehension do not differ in their ability to decode orthographic forms successfully, find referents for pronouns, or perform many of the other tasks used to analyze the components of reading; (2) performance differences within the various components investigated were tied to the difficulty of the test materials; (3) the distinction in the efficiency or automaticity of components appeared to extend to all three processing domains; and (4) the less efficient processes were of an attention demanding nature. (FL)