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Suddenly today I've encountered a sentence which got me crazy. honestly, I can't understand the difference between "comprehend" and "perceive"?

The first stage in the comprehension process is the perception of the speech signal, an acoustic signal produced the speaker. This includes the position of the tongue, lips, velum, the state of the vocal cords, and the airstream mechanisms.

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Perceptions are interpretations of the messages from our environment based on our past experience, the current context, our needs, goals and expectations.

Our ability to perceive and sense contributes to our uniqueness on a further dimension: we have a conscious awareness of ourselves and an ability to go beyond that experience, extending the limits of our consciousness. Perception also refers to later processes that organize and interpret information in a sensory image as having been produced by the properties of objects in the external, three dimensional word.

The first stage in the comprehension process is the perception of the speech signal, an acoustic signal produced the speaker. This includes the position of the tongue, lips, velum, the state of the vocal cords, and the airstream mechanisms. The intrepretation of these sounds is necessary in order to learn the language, therefore, understand the content (Fromkin and Rodman, 1991).

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    You perceive the dit-dit-dot-dit-dit of Morse code over a telegraph, but unless you understand the meaning of the code, you do not comprehend it.
    – TimR
    Commented Feb 13, 2018 at 20:10
  • Do these both translate to the same word in your native language? They have quite different definitions in English but it's possible that one word covers both in another language.
    – Andrew
    Commented Feb 13, 2018 at 20:32

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The sentence in your first quote basically means, "in order to understand spoken language, you first need to hear the sounds". Perception is "hearing the sounds", and comprehension is "understanding the words".

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Firstly perception is not hearing, seeing or otherwise sensing. A person might have a form of colour blindness or condition that would alter what he/she perceives from an objective reality.

As another example, consider depth perception. This is an early stage cognitive process that interprets azimuthal differentials between the two eyes along with size, movement and shadowing, to determine the distance to an object. It happens on a low level that is often taken to be instictive. This is the first stage in a cognitive process that contiues up higher to assemble these chunks into meaning and act on them accordingly. E.g. a perceived distance and speed may combine to mean "uh-oh" and the reaction to duck.

What the text is saying is that perception forms part of comprehension. That it is the first stage and, by implication, there are others that follow it and build on it.

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