Comparison of the results of performance by 36 7th graders on 3 measures of listening comprehension--the Sentence Verification Technique (SVT), a subtest of the Test of Adolescent Language, and the Premise/Inference Stories-- supports the potential of the SVT as a listening comprehension test. (SLD)

Explores the relationship between group interaction and interlanguage development, specifically listening comprehension and the production of target grammar forms. Two groups of first-semester Spanish students at an American University took notes on a mini-lecture, then completed a text reconstruction and listening comprehension test. Results…

Considerable research has been conducted testing Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky's (1993) Mozart Effect (ME). This study attempts to replicate, in part, research that tested the ME on listening comprehension abilities. Also included in this study is an examination of control group issues in current day research. We hypothesized that students who listen to…

Background: During speech perception, the ability to integrate auditory and visual information causes speech to sound louder and be more intelligible, and leads to quicker processing. This integration is important in early language development, and also continues to affect speech comprehension throughout the lifespan. Previous research shows that…

Eye-tracking and gating experiments examined reference comprehension with fluent (Click on the red. . .) and disfluent (Click on [pause] thee uh red . . .) instructions while listeners viewed displays with 2 familiar (e.g., ice cream cones) and 2 unfamiliar objects (e.g., squiggly shapes). Disfluent instructions made unfamiliar objects more…

Two individual differences studies tested relationships between listening comprehension and two conceptualizations of working memory (WM) capacity. Recently, some theorists have stressed that the empirically indicated limits of rehearsal-based WM storage components are inconsistent with the amounts of information needed to accomplish complex…

The high school version of the Watson-Barker Listening Test was developed in response to the need for a listening test appropriate for high school students. The test was comprised of conversations that would normally occur in either the high school setting or in the home and was developed in two different versions. The test consists of five…

One of the major factors for the lack of quality listening research is a lack of knowledge about the process itself. The second major factor is the lack of a reliable and valid listening test. From a review of 107 articles on listening, 38 reports of listening research, and from studies of seven examiner-developed and three commercially-developed…

The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that increasing the rate of cognitive structuring of aurally input data through the use of compressed speech would improve scores on listening tests which measure ability in listening subskills. The hypothesis predicted that subjects trained in listening for details would improve in this…

This paper reports evidence supporting the use of the cloze procedure technique as a reliable way of assessing the listening proficiency of foreign students of English. Evidence was gathered from two small-scale experiments. (CHK)

Examines the conceptual and methodological similarities and differences of three listening measures--the Watson-Barker Listening Test, Kentucky Comprehensive Listening Test, and the Communication Competency Assessment Instrument. Provides information on the concepts being assessed in each and illuminates major methodological issues for listening…

An experiment is reported in which attention to one channel of a dichotic presentation was controlled by requiring S to memorize the list of verbal items presented over that channel. (Author)

The article compares normal language comprehension with that in aphasic patients in terms of both sentence and discourse comprehension. Implications for treatment of aphasic patients include emphasizing comprehension of main ideas, rather than details, and using materials with high imagery and personal relevance. (DB)

The study comparing effects of speaking rate and clear versus conversational speech to intelligibility by the hard of hearing concluded that simple processing to alter the relative durations of the speech materials was not adequate to assess the contribution of speaking rate to intelligibility differences. (Author/DB)

As China enters WTO, more college graduates with higher oral English proficiency are required. However, we learned that even students in some distinguished universities are lack of this ability. Based on her teaching experiences and the theory proposed by Krashen and some other well-know foreign languages teaching researchers, the author of this…