A person needs to be aware of language to comprehend it. Regarding spoken language, an individual must hear sounds, combine sounds into words and words into sentences, and find meaning in these combinations. Spoken language comprehension also involves having an awareness that volume, stress and intonation add to the meaning of communications. With verbal and sign languages, facial expressions and various gestures also add to meaning. Additionally, an awareness of word organization and communication context play a role in interpreting spoken, written and sign languages.
People have numerous cognitive abilities, many of which are used in the comprehension of language. Being able to focus attention on language is the first step toward comprehension. Also involved in language comprehension are an individual's ability to remember pieces of information and be able to organize and process these pieces of information. The abilities to reason and use abstract thinking when interpreting a speaker or writer's intended meaning also are crucial to language comprehension.
When encountering a word, there is more to comprehension than recalling a simple definition. A large part of language comprehension involves knowing the many semantic associations of individual words. For example, a duck is not just an animal; it is a type of bird that swims, it has a beak and webbed feet, it lives near water and it flies south in the winter. Word comprehension also involves knowledge of word parts. For example, adding an "s" to the word "duck" makes it mean more than one duck. In addition, comprehending a sentence involves having knowledge about word order. Consider the difference in meaning between these sentences: "The man caught a fish" and "A fish caught the man."
Contextual considerations are another aspect of language comprehension. Whether language is written, spoken or signed, different contexts change the meaning of any form of communication. Where a conversation takes place and who the participants are comprise a part of the context of spoken or signed language. For example, language at a business meeting is far more formal than the language two life-long friends use with each other at a casual dinner. Written language's context comes from the writing format and where the written piece appears. For example, poetry is a very different writing form than a business proposal, just as a scholarly journal is quite a different writing venue than a humor magazine.