Summaries of several papers are presented to develop a working theoretical analysis of reading comprehension and an understanding of development in language comprehension based upon empirical studies. Contributions from the areas of assessment, artificial intelligence, cognition (including schema theory), instruction, linguistics, learning disabilities, and memory are included. Articles summarized include, among others: "Failures to Comprehend and Levels of Processing in Reading" (M. Adams); "Schemata as Scaffolding for the Representation of Information in Connected Discourse" (R. Anderson et al.); "Perceptions, Thought, and Language" (T. Bever); "Children's Comprehension of Between- and Within-Sentence Syntactic Structures" (J. Bormuth et al.); "Defining Language Comprehension: Some Speculations" (J. Carroll); "Creativity in Verbalization and Its Implications for the Nature of Stored Knowledge" (W. Chafe); "Maintenance and Control in the Acquisition of Knowledge from Written Materials" (L. Frase); "Semantic Processing Units in Understanding Text" (C. Frederiksen); "On Relational Meaning: The Acquisition of Verb Meaning" (D. Gentner); "Toward a Functional Theory of Discourse" (R. Hurtig); "Comprehension and Recall of Text as a Function of Content Variables" (W. Kintsch et al.); "Remembrance of Things Parsed: Story Structure and Recall" (J. Mandler); and "The Organization of Prose and its Effects on Memory" (J. Meyer). (JDD)