Explains how the ear and the brain work together to make music listening possible. Argues good hearing does not ensure skilled listening, stressing that listening is a mental process. Examines the aural process and properties of sound, and describes listening behaviors within the basic levels of auditory processing. Provides a guide for teaching…

Explores whether listeners can discern if melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic parameters and pairings of these parameters are abstracted from the ongoing flow of a musical event. Reports that students in grades 3, 6, and 9 identified phrases as being the same as the initial phrase; grade 12 students identified different phrases more often. (CMK)

This study compared a story-based video instructional package, with a feature-length film as its focus, to a text-based program. It explored the effectiveness of each approach to enhance the listening and grammar performances of intermediate-level college French students. Twenty-seven students at two institutions participated. A pretest-posttest…

Designed to be used before and after attending a musical adaptation of Jonathan's Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" (performed by the Mermaid Theatre of Nova Scotia), this cue sheet presents information about the performance and suggests activities that can be done with classmates, friends, or family members. Beginning with an illustration of…

The power of language gives children (and the rest of us) that "magic" talent of bringing to life that which is otherwise hidden from conscious awareness. From the viewpoint of one attempting to listen to children's languaging within experience so that the listening becomes a dialogic experience, the child storyteller seems to experience…

Article provided an evaluative checklist that might be of help in finding avenues of communication through the listening development of students and adults. (Author/RK)

Cerebral laterality was examined for third, fourth, and fifth grade deaf (N=30) and hearing (N=30) Ss. The experimental task involved the processing of word and picture stimuli presented singly to the right and left visual hemifields. The analyses indicated that deaf children were faster than the hearing children in overall processing efficiency,…

Dictation provides practice in concentrated listening and understanding, increases the attention span, strengthens the memory, and provides training in accurate recording. (DD)

The study examined the sensitivity of young children (3-7 years old) and adults to the acoustic variations resulting from a speaker's coarticulation (or coproduction) of phonetic segments. Results indicated perceptual sensitivity to certain coarticulatory effects present as early as three years of age. (Author/DB)

The study evaluated the degree of accuracy with which three groups of listeners (all speech language pathologists) could use perceptual analysis alone for identification of the following specific dysarthria types: flaccid, spastic, ataxic, hypokinetic, hyperkinetic chorea, hyperkinetic dystonia, and mixed. Listeners demonstrated minimal success in…

Twelve hearing-impaired and eight normal-hearing adults listened to speech and music programs that were reproduced using five different frequency responses (one flat, the others combinations of reduced lower frequencies and/or increased higher frequencies). Most preferred was a flat response at lower frequencies and a 6dB/octave increase…

Reports on four experiments on how differences in utterance relations influence understanding anaphors, that is, devices that refer back to previously mentioned words or concepts in a discourse. Findings suggest that readers may selectively keep information available if it is likely to be needed for interpreting subsequent input. (SED)