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Description: Much prior research on reading has focused on a specific level of processing while down-playing the contribution of higher-level and lower-level contributions to these processes. Here, for the first time, we provide a combined investigation of what are hypothesized to be three key component processes in reading comprehension: letter-level, word-level, and sentence-level processing. We did so by testing the same group of participants in three tasks thought to reflect processing at each of these levels: alphabetic decision, lexical decision, and grammatical decision. Participants also performed a speeded animal / non-animal classification of line drawings, with an aim to partial-out common binary decision processes from the correlations across the three main tasks. We therefore examined the pairwise partial correlations for response times (RTs) in the three reading tasks, and we also performed a principal component analysis (PCA) on the RTs in all four tasks. The results revealed strong significant correlations across adjacent levels of processing (i.e., letter-word; word-sentence) and a non-significant correlation between non-adjacent levels (letter-sentence). The PCA revealed four main factors, each of which loaded primarily on one of the four tasks. We interpret these four factors as reflecting letter-level, word-level, and sentence-level processing, plus a further factor reflecting semantic processing. The results fit best with hierarchically organized cascaded-interactive processing accounts of reading comprehension.