Pathways to comprehension: The role of supra-lexical monitoring in narrative and informational text understanding

Understanding how readers extract meaning from different text genres provides a critical test for models of reading comprehension. The present study integrates the Lexical Quality Hypothesis (Perfetti, 2007 ) and the Combinatorial Model of reading acquisition (Share, 2025 ) to examine how lexical knowledge, decoding processes, and supra-lexical monitoring jointly support comprehension across narrative and informational texts in Hebrew. Ninety-four Hebrew-speaking fourth graders completed a comprehensive battery assessing vocabulary, morpho-lexical knowledge, reading accuracy and speed, supra-lexical monitoring (via a Garden Path paradigm), and comprehension of narrative and informational texts. Path analysis revealed both shared and differential pathways, explaining substantial variance in comprehension (41% for narrative, 51% for informational). A common pathway emerged in which supra-lexical monitoring contributed directly to comprehension in both text types, linking word-level processes to higher-level meaning construction. Beyond this shared mechanism, distinct patterns were observed: narrative comprehension was primarily supported by vocabulary and monitoring, whereas informational comprehension relied on a broader constellation including morpho-lexical knowledge and reading speed. These findings highlight supra-lexical monitoring as a central regulatory mechanism in reading comprehension and suggest that the relative contributions of lexical and decoding processes may vary with the discourse and linguistic demands associated with narrative and informational genres, as instantiated in the two texts examined. The study advances an integrated account of comprehension by showing how shared and differential pathways emerge within a unified framework during the transition from learning to read to reading for learning.