The Origins of Language Comprehension 1

This paper is concerned with a neglected but central aspect of language development, namely, the development of comprehension in the child. While the investigation of language development has advanced rapidly in the last decade, it has been far more concerned with children’s speech production than with their understanding of what is said to them. There exist no in-depth investigations of the emergence of comprehension during the period before and while the child learns to talk. Rather, what study there has been of comprehension in children, as in adults, has involved discrete experimental studies. For the most part, such investigations have been concerned with the comprehension of particular grammatical…