Purpose: The present study was designed to evaluate use of spectral and temporal cues under conditions in which both types of cues were available. Method: Participants included adults with normal hearing and hearing loss. We focused on 3 categories of speech cues: static spectral (spectral shape), dynamic spectral (formant change), and temporal…

To better understand what constitutes listening competency, we perform a systematic review of listening scales. Our goal was twofold: to determine the most commonly appearing listening traits and to determine if listening scales are similar to one other. As part of our analysis, we identified 53 relevant scales and analyzed the scales…

Teaching requires the navigation of an intricate terrain of complex and often overlapping issues, many of which extend beyond the classroom setting. Teachers are uniquely placed to influence large numbers of learners beyond the delivery of prescribed curriculum, and therefore need to be particularly careful and aware of their professional ways of…

A number of factors influence the speech and language development of young children. Delays in the development of speech and language can have repercussions for school attainment and life chances. This paper is based on a survey of 3- to 4-year-old children in the city of Stoke-on-Trent in the UK. It analyses the data collected from 255 children…

Modern working life calls for competences that enable people to be creative, innovative and effective. Studies looking at contemporary enterprises and organisations such as businesses and schools have shown that many of the qualifications that graduating students would need, including informal learning (see Gielen, Hoeve & Nieuwenhuis 2003),…

In the article, Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon asks, Did Plato have a philosophy of listening, and if so, what was it? Listening is the counterpart of speaking in a dialogue, and it is no less important. Indeed, learning from the dialogue is less likely to occur as people participate unless listening as well as speaking takes place. Haroutunian-Gordon…

"Listening" is a multidimensional construct that consists of complex (a) cognitive processes, such as attending to, understanding, receiving, and interpreting messages; (b) affective processes, such as being motivated and stimulated to attend to another person's messages; and (c) behavioral processes, such as responding with verbal and nonverbal…

A large linguistic distance exists between spoken Arabic and the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) the literary language (a diglosia). Novice readers, therefore, struggle with the complex orthography of Arabic as well as the mastering of MSA. Here, we tested whether structured activities in MSA would advance kindergarteners' MSA aptitude by the end of…

This study investigated the relationships among the quality of L2 test takers' notes evaluated in terms of different levels of information and test takers' performance on open-ended listening tasks tapping into different comprehension subskills. In addition, this study examined the invariance of the structural relationships among the variables…

Purpose: To investigate the clinical utility of the Children's Auditory Processing Performance Scale (CHAPPS; Smoski, Brunt, & Tannahill, 1992) to evaluate listening ability in 12-year-old children referred for auditory processing assessment. Method: This was a prospective case control study of 97 children (age range = 11;4 [years;months] to…

Purpose: To evaluate the effect of different speech conditions on background noise acceptance. A total of 23 stimulus pairings, differing in primary talker gender (female, male, conventional), number of background talkers (1, 4, 12), and gender composition of the background noise (female, male, mixed) were used to evaluate background noise…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether: (a) inexperienced listeners can reliably judge listener effort and (b) whether listener effort provides unique information beyond speech intelligibility or acceptability in tracheoesophageal speech. Twenty inexperienced listeners made judgments of speech acceptability and amount of effort…

This study investigated the relationship between student performance on behavioral measures (reading, language, and executive function) and reading comprehension while reading with and without text-to-speech (TTS) accommodations. Twenty-nine children with reading difficulties ages 8 to 12 years completed a battery of reading, language, and…

Leading scholars (Gilbert, 2009; Walter, 2008) have highlighted the importance of phonological processing in learning to read. Nevertheless, reading in Japan has traditionally been taught without adequate attention to the role of phonological processing. Accordingly, it was speculated that Japanese university students would demonstrate superior…

This study explored the background knowledge (BK) and reading comprehension (RC) relationship for struggling adult readers. Using confirmatory factor analyses, a single-factor BK model exhibited better fit than a two-factor model separating academic knowledge and general information, which indicates that BK represents a unidimensional construct…