This study examined the abilities of adult listeners to discriminate and identify temporal order of sounds presented in tonal sequence. Listeners had either normal hearing or mild to moderate sensorineural hearing losses. In general, older listeners performed more poorly than younger listeners on the discrimination and identification tasks. Order…

Reports on a study that investigated the listening comprehension of 60 primary school students who were in their second year of learning English as a foreign language. Students listened to two tales that had been simplified under two different conditions: (1) with linguistic adjustments, and (2) with linguistic and interactional adjustments…

Native and experienced nonnatives listened to a text while performing a concurrent task. Half of each group was given the topic of the passage. Scores on the concurrent task were compared with baseline to index working memory (WM) consumption. Results showed greater WM consumption for nonnatives than natives when the topic was unavailable,…

Thirty-one City University of Hong Kong students for whom English is a second language viewed an English-language videotaped lecture, while 32 students viewed the same lecture with most of the discourse markers deleted. The students comprehended the lecture better when the discourse markers were included than when they were deleted. Contains 52…

Looks at growth in listening comprehension of 146 children from third grade to fifth grade and their fifth-grade estimate of accumulated wide reading as measured by an instrument using a checklist-with-foils logic, the Title Recognition Test. Indicates that individual differences in growth of listening comprehension from third grade to fifth grade…

This study examined effects of talker variability and lexical difficulty on spoken-word recognition among native and non-native listeners with either normal or impaired hearing. Non-native listeners required greater intensity for equal intelligibility than native listeners. Significant effects of talker variability and lexical difficulty were…

Discusses factors that influence learners' listening comprehension in relation to a group of Chinese English-as-Second-Language learners in Singapore. Reports on how one type of knowledge, within a broader framework of metacognitive knowledge, affects listening comprehension in learners of different ability levels. (Author/VWL)

Background: Receptive language impairments in school-age children have a poor prognosis, yet there is a dearth of research on effective interventions. Aims: Children's responses to a computerized grammatical training program were evaluated to consider whether repeated responding to spoken sentences with variable semantic content and the same…

Because students with visual impairments need auditory materials in order to access information, listening comprehension skills are important to their academic success. The present study investigated the effectiveness of summarization-based cumulative retelling strategy on the listening comprehension of four visually impaired college students. An…

Children typically learn in classroom environments that have background noise and reverberation that interfere with accurate speech perception. Amplification technology can enhance the speech perception of students who are hard of hearing. Purpose: This study used a single-subject alternating treatments design to compare the speech recognition…

Purpose: This investigation examined the comprehension of third person singular /s/ in 30 African American English (AAE)-speaking children as a subject-number agreement marker on a comprehension task. Method: A comprehension task was presented to 30 typically developing AAE-speaking children between the ages of 4 and 6. The children were randomly…

The authors used 2 "visual-world" eye-tracking experiments to examine lexical access using Dutch constructions in which the verb did or did not place semantic constraints on its subsequent subject noun phrase. In Experiment 1, fixations to the picture of a cohort competitor (overlapping with the onset of the referent's name, the subject) did not…

This article introduces the reader to two online sources of materials for working on improving listening and reading skills. The materials are intended for learners already at Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) Level 3 (Superior) proficiency in Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Korean, Russian, and Spanish, who desire to reach Level 4 (Distinguished, or…

Assessment of auditory comprehension is necessary for therapeutic clinical intervention as well as remedial and special education services. In this study, the Test for Auditory Comprehension of Language-Revised (TACL-R), developed by Elizabeth Carrow-Woolfolk in 1985, was translated and adapted for use in the Lebanese culture. The adapted test was…

Sentence comprehension is a complex task that involves both language-specific processing components and general cognitive resources. Comprehension can be made more difficult by increasing the syntactic complexity or the presentation rate of a sentence, but it is unclear whether the same neural mechanism underlies both of these effects. In the…