The importance of vocabulary knowledge in reading comprehension tasks has been well recognized both in the mother tongue and in a foreign language. This research investigates the dimensions of breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge and how they relate to the reading comprehension abilities of students of English as a foreign language. Thirty-three students of a Chilean university participated in this study. The Vocabulary Levels Tests were used to measure the students’ vocabulary in its receptive level, the Word Associates Test was used to determine the students’ depth of vocabulary knowledge and, the Reading Comprehension part of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) was used to evaluate the students’ reading comprehension level. The results suggest that there is a relationship between the dimensions depth and breadth of lexical knowledge; nevertheless, the strongest relationship was shown by the results achieved by students’ vocabulary knowledge at the 3,000 words level and academic vocabulary.
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