This paper was presented as a Presidential Address to Division 15 of the American Psychological Association Convention in Washington, D.C. on September 2, 1967. The author sketches and considers in detail four of the problems faced in studying the process of learning from meaningful discourse: (1) how the individual learns native language and how this learning makes it possible to learn from meaningful discourse, (2) how an individual understands sentences upon immediate presentation, (3) how sentence-comprehensions are retained, and (4) the relation between learning through language and learning by other means.