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Reading comprehension in a foreign language is a complex cognitive activity that requires the coordination of lower-level and higher-level processes. Foundational models of reading emphasize that efficient word recognition (decoding) is essential for successful comprehension because it allows readers to allocate cognitive resources to meaning construction rather than basic form processing (Perfetti, 2007; Perfetti & Stafura, 2014; Stanovich, 1980). When word recognition is slow or effortful, cognitive resources are consumed by decoding, leaving fewer resources available for building a coherent mental representation of the text (Rayner & Reichle, 2010; Vellutino et al., 2007). In EFL contexts, this issue is even more pronounced. Foreign language readers often have less automatized lexical processing and weaker orthographic–phonological mappings, which slows word recognition and disrupts comprehension (Koda, 2007; Nassaji, 2014). Research with EFL learners shows that lower-level processing skills, especially word recognition speed and accuracy, strongly predict reading comprehension outcomes (Fender, 2003; Shahnazari & Mahshanian, 2021). At the same time, reading is not only a linguistic process but also an attentional one. A growing body of cognitive research highlights mind wandering—the shift of attention away from the task toward internally generated thoughts—as a major source of comprehension failure (Smallwood & Schooler, 2006, 2015). When readers mind wander, they become perceptually decoupled from the text, leading to shallow processing and reduced recall (Schooler et al., 2011; Feng et al., 2013). Meta-analytic evidence confirms a robust negative relationship between mind wandering and reading comprehension (Bonifacci et al., 2023). Recent theoretical perspectives suggest that processing difficulty increases the likelihood of attentional disengagement (Kahmann et al., 2022; Soemer & Schiefele, 2019). Difficult texts and disfluent reading conditions have been