Examines what is meant by the term status within social relationships, offering a short synopsis of research to date on second-language listening factors. The paper argues that, because research shows that the social relationship affects behavior, the social relationship affects conversational interaction, and conversational interaction affects…

Studies the relationships among children's aural perception of tonal pattern and children's symbol use in drawing and selection tasks based on tonal information. Shows that ability to use musical symbols in reading and writing tasks is related to aural perception of musical sound, and that these abilities follow a developmental progression. (DSK)

A study assessed the effects of reverberation, noise, and their combination on 80 listeners' (ages 6-30) identification of consonants and vowels in naturally produced nonsense syllables presented at different sensation levels (SL). Listeners achieved maximum consonant identification performance at 50 decibels SL. Vowel identification scores were…

Presents comparative think-aloud protocols of beginning level language learners listening to an oral test. Argues that successful listeners use more metacognitive strategies and use these strategies to interact at a deeper level with a text to construct meaning. Outlines an instructional model for developing metastrategic awareness. (Author/VWL)

This study compared the speech perception skills over time (mean = 3.5 years) of 74 prelingually deaf children using cochlear implants with the predicted speech perception skills of 58 similar children using hearing aids. Generally, speech perception scores for the children using cochlear implants were higher that those predicted for children with…

Studied the sampling variability of estimated variance components using data collected over several years for a listening and writing performance assessment and evaluated the stability of estimated measurement precision. Results indicate that the estimated variance components varied from one year to another and suggest that the measurement…

Assesses effectiveness of a representational visual imagery training program on the reading and listening comprehension of a group of poor listening comprehenders (mean age: 7 years 8 months). Finds significant improvement on a curriculum-based test of listening comprehension, a standardised test of reading comprehension, and a measure of story…

A cross-dialectal comprehension test was conducted at Ohio University and three of its branch campuses. Results indicated that vowel changes occurring in Southern Ohio were generally interpreted by respondents in terms of their own vowel systems, and that limited exposure to the local dialect by outsiders led to recognition only of the more…

Studied how children learn to identify what is meant by what is said in communicative practices, focusing on the interplay between the adult and the child. Results for 21 Swedish children aged 3 to 5 show that whether children are able to adopt other people's perspectives is a situated affair that reflects the way in which they are brought into a…

A study compared the ability of 12 children with normal language and 12 children with specific language impairment (SLI) (ages 6-11) to comprehend natural speech and DECtalk synthetic speech. DECtalk was more difficult for all subjects to comprehend. Subjects with SLI had more difficulty comprehending both natural and synthetic speech. (Author/CR)

A study examined perceptual-weighting strategies and performance-audibility functions of 11 children with moderate hearing impairments (HI), 11 age-matched peers, 11 adults with moderate HI, and 11 typical adults. Results showed both hearing sensitivity and age effects. Listeners with HI required lower levels of audibility to achieve similar…

"Voices in the Park" (Browne, 1998) was one of nine picture books I used in a study that explored the nature of Grade 1 children's literary understanding by examining their verbal responses during storybook read-aloud sessions, and their subsequent written, visual arts, and dramatic responses. This article discusses the Grade 1 students' responses…

Adults (ages 17-23) with childhood developmental dyslexia (CD) completed measures of phonological processing, naming speed, working memory, general knowledge, vocabulary and comprehension. Subjects scored lower than chronological age-matched adults, but were similar to reading-level matched children on most processing measures. Results suggest…

Spoken language comprehension requires the coordination of different subprocesses in time. After the initial acoustic analysis the system has to extract segmental information such as phonemes, syntactic elements and lexical-semantic elements as well as suprasegmental information such as accentuation and intonational phrases, i.e., prosody.…

This paper reports on the findings of an investigation into the perceptions held by English students aged 16-18 years regarding listening comprehension in French and how they view the reasons behind their success or lack of it in this skill. The study suggests that listening comprehension is the skill in which students in the post-compulsory phase…