Although ubiquitous learning enhances students' access to learning materials, it is crucial to find out which media delivery modes produce the best results for English listening comprehension. The present study examined the effect of media delivery mode (sound and text vs. sound) on English listening comprehension and cognitive load. Participants…

The study involving 82 hearing and 78 hearing impaired undergraduates was undertaken to test the hypothesis that hearing impaired Ss would cluster prepositions into different sentence groups when operating from scrambled story presentations than would hearing Ss. It was also hypothesized that hearing impaired Ss would show different cluster…

A shadowing paradigm was used to determine the extent to which subjects could comprehend a spoken message without allocating attention or awareness to it. The paradigm involved presenting subjects with a control passage describing neutral events and an experimental passage describing embarrassing events over an unattended auditory channel.…

Three experiments used "rhyme priming," a methodology in which lexical decisions to a visually presented word are facilitated when the word is preceded by a rhyming word, to investigate the access and maintenance of speech-based codes in sentence comprehension. In these experiments, the pairs were visually dissimilar rhymes, such as…

Noting the differences in processing information by reading and by listening, two studies examined subjects' ability to detect errors in written and oral prose. In both experiments, college students were presented with four expository passages drawn from different written sources. All passages were approximately 300 words and 5 paragraphs long,…

In the two major sections of this paper the influence of John B. Carroll and Robert Lado on the teaching and testing of listening comprehension since 1961 is examined. The first section reviews the literature of that field and outlines four major periods roughly corresponding to the methodological orientation dominating professional thinking at…

Story length and plausibility were varied to see whether these factors significantly affect children's ability to monitor their comprehension. A total of 19 third graders and 25 sixth graders were individually read four stories in a counterbalanced order. Each story had one of the following sets of characteristics: long, low plausibility; short,…

A study examined the effects of conversational themes and attention-focusing strategies on conversational comprehension. The variables in the study were (1) the presentation of ambiguous versus unambiguous themes of conversations, (2) using personal versus content-oriented themes in conversations, and (3) presenting listeners with personal versus…

The design of instructional materials for second language listening comprehension is discussed, based on the premise that such materials must reflect a view of the nature and processes of listening. Two distinct kinds of cognitive processes involved in listening are examined: bottom-up processing, or the use of incoming data as a source of…

In a study conducted to measure children's visual attention to a television program and relate it to comprehension of content, 64 children equally distributed by sex from kindergarten and fifth grade, were randomly assigned to one of four treatment conditions. These conditions crossed two levels of content cues with two levels of sound effects…

A study of the process of listeners' and readers' generation and verification of expectations about spoken and written discourse presented to them examined the possible interactions between surface form and cognitive constraints, to establish baseline measures of the effectiveness of different sentence structures in constraining the production of…

A total of 47 6-year-old children listened to stories after which they either constructed pictorial representations of those stories from a set of backgrounds and cut-out figures and objects, or they spent equivalent time classifying geometric figures. The pictorial elaboration task inhibited recall of the stories. This contrasts with results…

This study was designed to test the effects of message summaries on the recall of main points of an informative message. Two different types of summary techniques, a mnemonic and a traditional type, were identified and compared with each other and with a third treatment involving no summaries. One hundred and eleven volunteer subjects were…

This paper considers the process by which humans are able to select from the complex string of sounds impinging on the ear and understand certain frequency combinations to be linguistic signals while other combinations are not. A brief review of the complex subcortical region, particularly the known but seldom studied reticular system, indicates…

A study investigated Japanese 3-to-5-year-olds' comprehension of sentences using the temporal terms "before" and "after" and examined whether contextual information helped the children respond correctly. The children were asked to perform a task with a toy either before or after performing another task with a different toy.…