ABSTRACT
As comprehension is a mental event that must be inferred indirectly from a child's behavior in a particular context, the emergence of receptive language competence has been less accessible to scientific inquiry than the development of speech production abilities. This chapter describes some exemplary studies of receptive language competence from the first 150 years of research on language acquisition. These studies reveal a lively interest in the development of speech comprehension that was evident in early research but receded as the field began to focus increasingly on speech production. The chapter examines a dozen research themes related to the development of comprehension that began to emerge more or less independently between 1970 and 1980, along with the new methods for their empirical exploration that developed around the same time. It relates these converging themes and methods to four important discoveries about the early development of language understanding that are emerging from recent research.
