Dictation is a traditional technique for both teaching and testing overall language ability and listening comprehension. In a dictation, a passage is read aloud by the teacher and examinees write down what they hear. Due to the peculiar form of dictations, psychometric analysis of dictations is challenging. In a dictation, there is no clear…

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

Aphasic adults (N=16) with severe auditory comprehension impairment were evaluated for comprehension of redundant and nonredundant spoken and/or gestured messages. Results indicated redundancy was not reliably superior to spoken messages alone. (Author/DB)

Describes a study which examines the relationship between context redundancy and keyword intelligibility in sentences having both high and low redundancy. Word pairs were placed in similar positions in two sets of sentences: sentence pairs that one might find in text, and adages together with sentences that might be spoken. (SED)

Describes an experiment designed to determine the effect of missing syntactic cues on listeners' comprehension of grammatical sentences heard through noise. Comparison between sentences containing function word deletions and sentences with a more clearly displayed syntactic structure suggests that deletion of minor cues hinders comprehension under…

Four groups of 10- to 16-year-old educable mental retardates listened to a 20-sentence story; subjects (1) viewed pictures; (2) generated mental pictures; (3) heard each sentence twice; or (4) listened to the story once. Recall of story information was highest for those who viewed pictures. (Author/GDC)

Teachers and testers should encourage children to repeat or restate verbal stimuli in order to enhance their comprehension. Changing the administration of a language comprehension test to include such restatement significantly raised the mean test scores of four- and five-year old Head Start children. (CTM)

A study was conducted to explore the process of learning from television news and the relationship between audio and visual channels. The subjects, 82 undergraduate journalism majors enrolled in five newswriting classes, were randomly assigned to experimental conditions. Newscasts were recorded from evening newscasts aired by networks, and scripts…

Investigates whether first- and fourth-grade children vary their production of redundant messages (saying more than the minimal necessary to be informative) as a function of sharing common experience with a listener. (HOD)

Words artificially isolated from 12 parents' speech to their children aged 1;10-3;0 were significantly less intelligible to adult listeners than words originally spoken to an adult. While parents did not adjust the clarity of words, their speech was more redundant in anticipation of the children's comprehension. Research implications are…

Examines the effect of redundancy of information on the intelligibility of hearing and deaf children's speech. Based on intelligibility scores obtained for a set of words presented both in context and in isolation, suggests that the children do not use the same production strategies to assist listeners. (Author/MES)

Impromptu speech is characterized by the simultaneous processes of ideation (the elaboration and structuring of reasoning by the speaker as he improvises) and expression in the speaker. Other elements accompany this characteristic: division of speech flow into short segments, acoustic relief in the form of word stress following a pause, and both…

An investigation of a saturation advertising campaign to acquaint the public with changes in radio wavelengths showed that repeated presentation of material does not lead to learning unless appropriate encoding occurs. Such encoding will occur when subjects are allowed to use previously acquired learning strategies. (PMJ)

The idea of reducing the redundancy of a verbal message in a statistical way is presented as a practiced technique of language testing. Considering the temporality of speech comprehension, and the necessarily sequential intake of information, these cues may include the serial order of elements and transitional probability. To give the background…