SummaryThe Comprehension of specific linguistic structures and contexts are of extreme importance, particularly in the language‐delayed child, and often overlooked in assessing Comprehension of total utterances. In this study a group of language‐delayed preschool children were assessed in comparison with a normal group, on various measures of linguistic structure both in Comprehension and Imitation tasks. A qualitative analysis of the resultant data was made, and an attempt to further analyse response patterns in terms of possible cognitive strategies being used. The hypothesis that the language‐delayed children might not have the same capacity for language comprehension as the normal child was not supported although differential effects of changes in linguistic structure and context were