Four studies used the theoretically based understanding of comprehension developed by W. Kintsch and T. A. van Dijk to look for processes that might undergo development as a child becomes more practiced and skilled in reading so that an understanding of these processes might become the basis for reading remediation programs. The first three studies produced the following four conclusions: (1) third grade students used the same units of meaning to construct a mental representation of the meaning of a text as fifth grade students and adults; (2) beginning readers construct these units just as quickly as more skilled readers; (3) beginning readers connect these units into the same organizational structures as skilled readers; and (4) large developmental differences in working memory capacity and speed of lexical access do exist between fourth and sixth grade students. Assuming that the paucity of developmental differences found in these studies is the result more of theoretical inadequacy than the nonexistence of such differences, the final study examined the role of perspective in encoding and retrieval and the basis for coherence in texts. (JL)