Optimal acquisition:Why children's language production can exceed their comprehension

This paper discusses a developmental paradox, namely that children’s performance in language production sometimes exceeds their performance in language comprehension. This yields a puzzle for most theories of language acquisition. If a child produces a linguistic form correctly, this is considered to be evidence that the child possesses the relevant grammatical knowledge. However, if the child possesses the relevant grammatical knowledge to produce a linguistic form correctly, then why is this child unable to interpret the same linguistic form correctly? Four potential explanations for such asymmetries between production and comprehension are discussed: task-based explanations, pragmatic explanations, interface explanations and grammatical explanations. The paper focuses on asymmetries occurring with subject-object word order and pronominal reference