The 34 summaries contained in this collection represent the theoretical positions and the empirical studies of a wide variety of investigators currently working in the field of language comprehension. The entries summarize contributions from the areas of assessment, artificial intelligence, cognition (including schema theory), instruction, linguistics, learning disabilities, and memory. Topics of individual reports include the following: (1) levels of processing in reading, (2) the structure of speech perceptions, (3) children's comprehension of syntactic structures, (4) the representation of common sense knowledge fragments, (5) logical and semantic structures of knowledge acquired from discourse, (6) acquiring new information as a process in comprehension, (7) semantic and expressive elaboration in children's narratives, (8) content variables that affect comprehension and recall, and (9) story structure and recall. A bibliography contains 55 additional references on comprehension theory and research. (RL)