A study explored word recognition and structural features of words as determinants of reading comprehension. Word recognition scores and comprehension scores for three age groups (6-7 years, 8-9 years, and 10-12 years) representing 1,200 children were used to examine the relationships of structural features of the word recognition task to comprehension performance. Results indicated that the relationship between word recognition and comprehension remained high at all three age levels, dropping only slightly for the oldest children. Results also indicated that the capability to predict comprehension from structural features of the recognized words dropped dramatically for the older children. Findings support a model with the following characteristics: (1) word recognition for younger children is understandable in terms of a small number of structural features of words, which themselves are predictors for each child; and (2) the importance of structural features of words decreases across age levels and indicates that there are developmental characteristics of word recognition that relate to comprehension performance. (One table of data is included.) (RS)