ABSTRACT
The children with specific language impairment constitute a heterogeneous group, they share several key characteristics. These children show significant deficits in linguistic functioning in the face of adequate auditory acuity, age-appropriate performance on nonverbal tests of intelligence, and the absence of gross neurological disability. The initial session with each child was devoted to obtaining a representative sample of the child's speech as well as his or her level of play. For most of the children it was also possible to obtain a sample of interaction between the child and his or her mother during this session. There are two issues in the relationship between comprehension and production in early lexical acquisition. The first concerns the developmental sequence of comprehension and production for any given unit of language. The second concerns the specific characteristics of comprehension abilities as compared with those of production abilities.
