A study of children's recognitory comprehension, the rudimentary ability to begin decoding the content of language, at the end of the first year had as subjects 36 infants aged 10.5, 11.5, and 12.5 months. In an examination of monthly developmental change in their ability to comprehend newly introduced referential terms, the children were exposed to toys, displayed under lights and available for manipulation, as well as the toys' names. Target questions about the toy and control questions using nonsense words were asked of the children. The process was videotaped. The proportion of time the child fixated the target toy out of the total time spent fixating all the toys was calculated for the question intervals. The infants were able to recognize the referent of an object name after a brief, naturalistic language exposure. This ability probably constitutes the beginning of the capacity to learn the conventionalized referential meaning of language. The findings suggest that this age range, although small, represents a period of rapid development of lexical recognition. The findings are consistent with cognitive theories of intellectual development. (MSE)