mapped with children’s ceiling performance on the multiple choice task. On the other hand,
the “symbolic comprehension” is more advanced and requires the child to show some
evidence of understanding that a word does not merely co-occur with an object, but in fact
stands for or refers to it. The “symbolic comprehension” could be also parallelled with
children’s success in the definition task for example.

8.4.2 Comprehension does not equal production

“Language comprehension” relates to the receptive function of language, that is, to the ability
to make sense of language as a hearer or a reader. On the other hand, “Language production”
refers to the expressive function of language, that is to the ability to use language as a
speaker (Donaldson and Laing, 1993).

How distinct are comprehension and production ? Both experiments in the present study
demonstrated that children performed better on the multiple choice than the naming task.
This discrepancy between production and comprehension has also been highlighted by other
studies (Gathercole and Baddeley, 1989; Michas and Henry, 1994). According to Clark and
Hecht (1983) comprehension and production are not symmetrical and that their differences
show up in the earliest stages of language acquisition. Clark (1993) also claims that
comprehension must precede production. Different studies have shown that young children
can understand forms well before they can produce them (Clark and Berman, 1984; Harris,
et. al 1993).

The apparent primacy of comprehension over production raises questions as to whether the
cognitive requirements for comprehension are somehow more minimal than those for
production. Oviatt (1980, 1982) has suggested that recognitory comprehension, for example
involves more minimal cognitive demands than word production. One main difference is that
comprehension is possible with only recognition memory (hearing a word and recognizing
it), whereas production requires recall memory as well (having to retrieve the appropriate
word from memory; Huttenlocher, 1974)

However, does better performance on comprehension versus production provide evidence for
the two being separate processes ? Do we need to investigate other relations as well ?
Experiment 1 demonstrated that children’s performance on the multiple choice task was

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