ABSTRACT
Historically, children's language comprehension has been studied less extensively than language production. Whereas production offers explicit data for analysis, comprehension can only be measured indirectly, making it a more challenging object of study. Studies of language comprehension are also less common than studies of language production in children with language disorders. A comparison group provides a point of reference in studies of children with atypical language development. All methods of testing comprehension are intended to provide insight into the knowledge and processes that underlie children's language comprehension. The truth-value judgment task has been used primarily to probe knowledge of sentence-level syntactic and semantic constraints in children with typical language development. Self-paced listening has been used to study sentence comprehension in school-aged children with typical language development and in children with specific language impairment. Testing comprehension in children with atypical language can present challenges that may not arise when testing typically developing children.
