A British woman recounts her difficulties in developing the ability to understand humorous French while living in France. (AM)

Provides examples of listening comprehension tests used in England which take into account communicative skill testing. (AM)

The rate of speaking in words per minute is a function of three independent variables, namely, articulation rate and the number and durations of pauses. The present study varies each of these components separately in a factorial design in order to determine how the listener combines them into a global impression of speech rate. (Editor)

Notes that phonemic restoration is a powerful auditory illusion. Points out that when part of an utterance is replaced by another sound, listeners perceptually restore the missing speech. Several paradigms measure this illusion and explore its bottom-up and top-down bases. Findings reveal that acoustic properties of the replacement sound strongly…

Thirty adults either with or without traumatic brain injury (TBI) listened to narratives, made delayed predictions of recall, and took a delayed recall test. Narrative questions differed by salience and explicitness. Although TBI survivors recalled less than control participants regardless of question type, there were no differences in predictive…

Aims to identify listening comprehension strategies used by adult Japanese native speakers and monolingual Australian learners of the Japanese language. Investigates how two different listening contexts (audiovisual and audio-only) may influence listeners' choice of strategies and how the strategies chosen relate to learners' proficiency.…

Describes a taxonomy of real-world listening tasks as a conceptual framework for teaching listening in a second language, and discusses the implications of the taxonomy for the design of listening instruction and the selection of authentic texts. The key elements of the taxonomy are listener function and listener response. (26 references)…

Discusses the advantages of using video materials in teaching Spanish at an intermediate level, where there are typically several levels of language knowledge and ability. Such materials improve students' ability to understand language context, listening comprehension, discussion skills, and awareness of different uses of language. (CB)

The discussion of techniques for teaching listening skills in the special education classroom offers a rationale and specific activities. It outlines steps in the listening process, the purposes of listening, effective practices in listening instruction, and lessons and procedures incorporating those practices. (MSE)

Presents an annotated bibliography on listening skills instruction and research for secondary and higher education business communication classes. (MM)

Examines the impact of one-on-one tutoring on the reading abilities of students with high listening comprehension scores. Concludes that there is no confirmation that listening comprehension is a reliable indicator of capacity level for students whose listening comprehension scores are above their expected grade placements. (RS)

Describes a model that allows children to control the complexity of the speech they hear within conversations on a moment-to-moment basis. Experimental and observational data clearly delineate the reciprocal nature of how speakers "fine-tune" their speech to listeners. The effects of child-directed speech on language development are discussed.…

This paper discusses recent research on second-language learning and argues that "prior knowledge" does not necessarily constitute the basis of comprehension in second-language learning, that "comprehended input" does not have to be "learner-controlled," and that "input" and "intake" are not necessarily two fundamentally different phenomena.…

Results from 3 experiments in auditory word recognition involving a total of 266 undergraduates supported interactive models of lexical processing, but required additional sublexical processes. The hypothesized sublexical mechanism is fast acting and frequency sensitive and produces top-down effects, but its operation has not yet been fully…

Study used two experiments to examine the development of children's comprehension of the use of intonation and belief verbs to mark the relative certainty with which a speaker makes a statement. It is argued that children's understanding of prosody will be best revealed in contexts in which they are required to respond to the pragmatic function of…