To succeed at reading, children must be able to identify or "read" printed words and understand the story or text composed of those words. For many children, increasing reading and school success will involve increasing oral language competence in the elementary years. Lack of appropriate vocabulary knowledge can result in academic failure. (SM)

Conceptualizes listening as the process of how individuals perceive, possess, remember, and understand oral messages. Examines four predominant listening styles as a function of respondant sex and gender-role self-perception. Concludes that gender-role self-perception mediated reported listener styles. (PM)

The study examined the effects of forward time gating (in which incremented portions of a word are presented) and word length on monosyllabic isolated word-recognition performance with 20 female college undergraduates. Listeners recognized time-gated words less frequently and with less confidence, and word length significantly influenced…

The study validated a method of identifying children (in grades four-six) with specific reading disabilities by identifying discrepancies between their reading and listening comprehension abilities. The test requires children to listen to or read alternate sentences. The method may be more appropriate than measures which examine discrepancies…

Investigates age differences in children's processes of simultaneously comprehending the auditory and visual content of a televised story. Reports a developmental increase in utilizing semantic content of both auditory and visual content to form a unified representation of narrated events. (MM)

Discusses the following barriers which interfere with listening efficiency: content, speaker, medium, distractions, mindset, language, listening speed, and feedback. Suggests ways to combat these obstacles to accurate comprehension. (MM)

Reports on a psycholinguistic investigation of a 10-year-old, nonautistic hyperlexic on tasks of written and auditory presentations of single words, sentences, and text. Finds good development of both phonological and lexical reading mechanisms. Finds a significant dissociation between reading accuracy and reading comprehension and also between…

Advances two processes describing the relationship between message behaviors and narrative comprehension that differ in the likelihood that specific interpretations will be drawn given the presence of message cues. Finds that, in general, cues biased young children toward drawing a particular representation but that fifth graders delayed choosing…

University students of Spanish at three different course levels were used in a study of the effects of topic familiarity on second-language listening comprehension. Findings regarding the supporting role of background knowledge are consistent with many second-language reading and listening studies. (Contains 45 references.) (LB)

Examined the ability of 10 4-year olds to generate and identify themes by relating text to life experiences and identifying with the feelings of characters. The children could not generate theme statements after they heard the story, but could talk about thematic elements and identify an appropriate theme statement from choices offered. (SH)

Examines format effects on the comprehension of television news. Finds that comprehension of television news is enhanced by the use of film and by mixing up formats. Finds also that comprehension is lowest for "talking head" items in programs with unvaried format and best for film items in mixed format newscasts. (PRA)

Evaluation of the speech perception of eight children (ages four and five) with specific language impairments and documented morphological difficulties found these children to be especially weak in discriminating speech stimuli whose contrastive portions had shorter durations than the noncontrastive portions (typical of English grammatical…

The relation of compliance to comprehension in toddlers of 12-18 months was studied. Requests were made to children in naturalistic play situations, and children's responses were coded. Significant shifts in the categories of compliance-comprehension and noncompliance-noncomprehension were found. (BC)

Explored effects of speech type and esteem level on performance, physiological arousal level, and subsequent esteem in older adults (n=40). Results indicated that older adults performed difficult tasks better with clarified instructions given in attention-getting manner. Findings were contradictory to more intuitive accounts of child-directed…

Children were interviewed about their conceptions of good listening, beliefs about appropriate actions for confused listeners, attributions of responsibility for a listener's confusion, reports of speakers' and listeners' feelings during communication breakdown, and ability to detect inconsistencies during a comprehension-monitoring task. (PCB)