Extensive research has been conducted on the relationships of Chinese-character recognition to reading development; strategic competence to reading comprehension; and home linguistic exposure to heritage language acquisition. However, studies of these relationships have been marked by widely divergent theoretical underpinnings, and their results are not directly comparable. The current study adopts a cognitive and component perspective on reading, and uses structural equation modeling (SEM) to examine character-recognition skills, reading comprehension skills, strategy use, and language background. Among these four factors, character-recognition skills are held to represent lower-level reading processing; reading comprehension and strategy-use represent higher-level processing; and language background is operationalized as a source of background knowledge. The present study's 85 participants were divided into four groups representing four language backgrounds: Singaporean Chinese Mother Tongue language learners (Singaporean CMTLLs) (n = 14), Chinese foreign language learners (CFLLs) (n = 19), Mandarin-speaking heritage language learners (Man-HLLs) (n = 38), and Cantonese-speaking heritage language learners (Can-HLLs) (n = 14). A package of eight instruments was administered via an online platform, and included a language-background survey, a multiple-choice grammar subtest, a fillin- the-blank cloze subtest, a multiple-choice passage-comprehension subtest, a strategy-use survey, an ortho-phonological subtest, an ortho-semantic subtest, and a morpheme discrimination subtest. The language-background survey was designed to gain a clear understanding of the participants' language backgrounds; the grammar, cloze, and passage comprehension subtests, to investigate their reading-comprehension ability; the strategy-use survey, to capture the participants' perceived use of six strategy types; and the ortho phonological, ortho-semantic, and morpheme subtests, to examine their character-recognition ability. Prior to examining common constructs of L2 Chinese reading across the participants' four language backgrounds, three profile analyses were conducted to examine the extent of language-background effects on reading comprehension, character-recognition, and strategy use. The results suggested that language background had a stronger effect on reading-comprehension ability (p = 0.001, partial n[superscript 2] = 0.18), than on character-recognition ability (p > 0.05, partial n[superscript 2] = 0.09) or on strategy use (p > 0.05, partial n[superscript 2] = 0.05). Next, a hypothesized SEM model was examined and modified. All parameter estimates in the revised SEM model were statistically significant at p < 0.05, and the 12 variables explained 99% of the variance in reading-comprehension ability. The structural model of the revised SEM model indicated that character recognition had a strong and direct effect on reading comprehension (r = 0.99); cognitive-strategy use had a medium and direct effect on reading comprehension (r = 0.21); and metacognitive-strategy use had no direct influence on reading comprehension, but yielded a strong and direct influence on cognitive-strategy use (r = 0.71), supporting the notion that metacognitive strategies exert an executive function over cognitive ones. However, monitoring--a type of metacognitive strategy--directly and negatively influenced character-recognition (r = -0.34). These paths suggest that the participants constantly monitored their character-level processes, and that when they encountered unfamiliar characters, monitoring strategies activated other metacognitive strategies to regulate cognitive strategies, which in turn facilitated comprehension processes to compensate for the interrupted character-recognition processes. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]