Intact classes of university students viewed either a serious lecture or one of three versions of a humorous lecture. A test of comprehension and retention was given twice: immediately after the lecture and six weeks later. Results indicated that immediate comprehension was not facilitated by the use of humorous examples. (Author/MV)

This study examined language and fluency characteristics of single-utterance (SU) and multiple-utterance (MU)conversational turns produced by 15 preschoolers who stutter and 15 nonstuttering peers. Results suggest that MU turns are demanding for young children because they evoke relatively long and complex utterances and that clinicians should…

Looks at two sets of complementary experimental data to consider whether listeners can determine the age of a speaker from hearing a voice sample. The experiments conducted involved speech samples from natural conversations; parallel studies were done in the United States, using native speakers and situations and native speakers as experimental…

Describes memory task performance of a 50-year-old female with a phonological short-term memory (STM) impairment. The patient showed a deficit of syntactic parsing restricted to the auditory modality, possibility because of an impaired STM and an impaired syntactic parser. Test material and results are appended. (Contains 39 references.) (Author)

Research has identified a number of dimensions along which speakers modify referring expressions. The study discussed here aimed to determine and describe the actual relationship existing between these production characteristics and corresponding measures of listener comprehension. (Author/VWL)

The process standards of communication and representation in the "Principles and Standards for School Mathematics" are critical tools to help students develop mathematical literacy. In the mathematics classroom, students need to be encouraged to use speaking, listening, reading, and writing to communicate their understanding of mathematics words,…

The use of videotape, 16mm film, or personally conducted programs in the Dallas Public Library story hours was studied to determine the effectiveness of the three methods in improving the listening skills of preschool children of varying socioeconomic levels. This report of the 1981/82 research project provides information on sample size…

Approaches to measuring listening comprehension that can be used in the classroom by teachers of English as a second language are presented. General abilities needed to comprehend spoken language, and stages that a second language learner may go through in developing proficiency in speech comprehension, are outlined. Techniques for measuring…

The experimental test measures the ability of a subject to reconstruct obscured words by means of sentence analysis, carried out not as a separate academic task, but in the normal procedure of understanding what the sentence says. It is a task built on the assumption that the ability to handle reduced redundancy is a valid measure of linguistic…

The purpose of this study was to discover the effect of the introduction of nonstandard English dialect and lexicon in the classroom and to test the hypotheses that students exposed to oral material in dialect and lexicon would comprehend more, would have greater verbal recall, and would be more flexible and fluent in assigning titles to oral…

The major purposes of this study were (1) to determine if a listening comprehension test was as valid as a reading readiness test, a visual motor test, a group intelligence test, or an individual intelligence test in measuring the reading readiness of first grade pupils; and (2) to determine if a combination of two or more of these tests would…

This article suggests criteria for evaluating listening comprehension tests. The weaknesses of typical test items are discussed and suggestions for new types of items are given. (CFM)

A study of children with listening comprehension difficulties concluded that these children also have reading problems that must be addressed either through remediation or alternative learning strategies. (SRT)

Comparison of the listening comprehension of second language learners completing three different prelistening activities after one and two exposures to a passage shows that scores for subjects completing the question preview activity were higher than for subjects completing the filler activity and that additional exposure improves comprehension.…

This study examines whether aural processing of input in a situation of implicit instruction can build a knowledge base that is available for both comprehension and production tasks. Fifty-five Dutch students learned a miniature linguistic system based on Spanish. Three training conditions were compared in which noun-adjective gender agreement was…