This study examines the perceptions of listening comprehension difficulties among English preservice teachers at a university in Thailand. Survey-based research was conducted using a questionnaire designed by Ahkam Hasan Assaf. The questionnaire consisted of 45 close-ended questions on a five-point Likert scale. Out of 98 English preservice…

This study investigates what early elementary students do during a new listening task and the effects of teaching listening strategies. An instructional programme was implemented in four classes of 6- to 7- year-olds in low socioeconomic index schools in French-speaking Belgium. In three classes, there was explicit teaching of listening…

Background: Although most prevalent in childhood, the acquisition of new words in oral vocabulary takes place right across the lifespan. Of the many factors that influence oral vocabulary learning, one extrinsic factor is the listening environment. The current study aimed to examine whether the presence of noise impacts oral vocabulary learning in…

Fluent listener behavior is a fundamental repertoire that affects the learning and development of speaker repertoires. We used a concurrent multiple-baseline design across 3 preschool-aged participants with disabilities to evaluate the effectiveness of a listener emersion protocol on increasing listener fluency. Prior to intervention, the…

Background and aims: Humans communicate primarily through spoken language and speech perception is a core function of the human auditory system. Among the autistic community, atypical sensory reactivity and social communication difficulties are pervasive, yet the research literature lacks in-depth self-report data on speech perception in this…

In this quasi-experimental study, the effects of lexical coverage through pseudo word manipulation in dialogue comprehension are investigated. Forty-four first-year students in a Japanese university listened to five dialogues at different lexical coverage levels: 98%, 95%, 90%, 85%, and 83%. The results of the comprehension tests confirm the…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate infants' listening preference for emotional prosodies in spoken words and identify their acoustic correlates. Method: Forty-six 3- to-12-month-old infants (M[subscript age] = 7.6 months) completed a central fixation (or look-to-listen) paradigm in which four emotional prosodies (happy, sad, angry,…

Listeners make use of contextual cues during continuous speech processing that help overcome the limitations of the acoustic input. These semantic, grammatical, and pragmatic cues facilitate prediction of upcoming words and/or reduce the lexical search space by inhibiting activation of contextually inappropriate words that share phonological…

In two visual world eye-tracking experiments, this dissertation examines the role of literacy on predictive processing during spoken language comprehension. Previous studies have shown that comprehenders can use morphosyntactic cues available in the input to generate predictions about upcoming information. Recent key findings also suggest that…

Shifting demographics in K-12 schools have increased Spanish-speaking Multi-Language Learners' (MLLs') enrollment across the United States. While literacy variations between MLLs and proficient English speakers have been studied predominantly with upper elementary students, there remains a need for more exploration among early elementary…

This study examines language demands in undergraduate university mathematics classes with a view to better preparing and supporting international and other culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students in the United States universities. We observed and analyzed the language demands of 13 entry-level mathematics classes across two large…

Oral communication often takes place in noisy environments, which challenge spoken-word recognition. Previous research has suggested that the presence of background noise extends the number of candidate words competing with the target word for recognition and that this extension affects the time course and accuracy of spoken-word recognition. In…

Purpose: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration indications for cochlear implantation in children is currently 9 months of age and older for children with bilateral profound sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL). Studies have shown that earlier activation of a cochlear implant (CI) can lead to better spoken language outcomes. As auditory skills are a…

Two widely studied language skills in relation to reading comprehension are listening comprehension skill and academic language proficiency. Although their constituent skills and theoretical accounts of how they are related to reading comprehension share a large overlap, they have been studied in separate lines of work. In this study, we…

A long-standing debate in the testing of listening concerns the authenticity of the listening input. On the one hand, listening texts produced by item writers often lack spoken language characteristics. On the other hand, real-life recordings are often too context-specific to stand alone, or not suitable for item generation. In this study, we…