In this study, Melanie Bangel investigates the extent to which stronger and weaker readers utilize insights into word formation structures for meaning assignment while reading. To this end, she collects retrospective metacognitive verbal protocols from fifth-grade students regarding the significance of contextually embedded and isolated written complex words, as well as the word analysis strategies underlying their meaning hypotheses. The analyses reveal different conceptions of the relationship between word formation structure and meaning. The results indicate that stronger and weaker readers primarily differ in how much they draw on context as a source of information and whether they can access morphological knowledge as cross-word problem-solving knowledge.