LISTENING: HIGHER-LEVEL PROCESSES

The processing of spoken input at a conceptual level as distinct from a perceptual one. This entails:

Constructing abstract meaning from the linguistic material in an utterance.

Employing contextual knowledge to enrich understanding and to supplement what is stated by the speaker. Here, the listener draws upon:

background knowledge, including world knowledge and knowledge of the speaker;

 previous experience of this type of speech event, of the level of attention that has to be accorded and the type of response that the listener is required to give;

information gained in the course of the speech event.

Integrating incoming information into a meaning representation of the speech event so far. The process entails an ability to identify main ideas, to determine the relative importance of others and to establish relationships between ideas. Incoming information has to be related to what has gone before, so as to ensure that it is consistent and relevant.

 Monitoring comprehension by checking the viability of the current interpretation.

As described so far, these higher-level processes are not dissimilar to those employed in reading. However, there are important differences between the two processes in that reading is potentially recursive: the reader can back-track to check understanding. By contrast, the listening signal is transitory. In addition, the time course of the reading process is under the control of the reader. In the listening process, the rate at which the signal is transmitted and processed is controlled not by the listener but by the speaker.

These factors have an important bearing on the way a listener builds meaning. Listeners have to carry information forward in their minds, without evidence against which to check it. Because of limitations of working memory, they only retain the actual words used by a speaker for a relatively short period of time. There is evidence of a wrap up process after each clause, in which the speaker’s words are turned into abstract propositional information and can no longer be quoted.

However, while the clause is being uttered, the listener can, if necessary, rehearse the actual form of words used (recycle them in the mind in a phonological code) in order to retain them. The purpose is not to assist the listener in identifying words, since word recognition has been shown to take place on-line, as the words are being heard. It is to support the processing of any clauses and sentences that are syntactically complex or ambiguous. The phonological component of working memory plays an important role in this process. The amount that can be processed in phonological working memory appears to vary between individuals, and may determine how well a listener retains what is heard.

 At the beginning of a piece of discourse, the listener sets up a set of expectations as to what will be said. As the utterance proceeds, the listener confirms, modifies or adds to this schema to build an ongoing meaning representation. Critical to higher-level listening processes is an element of self-monitoring where the listener evaluates their current interpretation. Evidence suggests that less-skilled listeners experience comprehension problems because they fail to self-monitor or because they make reduced use of monitoring strategies.

Alongside the developing meaning representation, the listener must also carry forward an awareness of the topic(s) currently being foreground by the speaker. This is necessary in order to achieve anaphor resolution. Anaphora (the use of referring words such as she, it, this) is generally less precise in speech than in writing and the listener cannot, like the reader, look back in order to identify what an anaphor is referring to.

The listener’s meaning representation may not necessarily accord closely with the message intended by the speaker. While an assessment of the speaker’s intentions is an important factor in shaping the representation, listeners do not passively ‘receive’ a message but actively remake it– taking from the utterance what they themselves deem to be relevant or important. They may even reinterpret what is said to fit their own viewpoint.

 Listening is often thus less precise than reading, with the listener more inclined to accept areas of ambiguity or to process for gist rather than detail. However, in some ways the auditory signal is more informative than the visual one. The listener can rely upon features such as pausing, intonation and relative speech rate (see prosody) to support syntactic parsing and even to disambiguate sentences that would in print be ambiguous.

See also: Inference, Interactional view, Meaning construction, Prosody, Reading: higher-level processes, Schema theory, Speech perception: autonomous vs interactive, Verbatim recall

Further reading: Brown (1995); Warren (1999)

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مواضيع ذات صلة

MAPPING (FORM-MEANING)

LOWER-LEVEL PROCESSING

LONG-TERM MEMORY (LTM)

LOGOGEN

LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY

LEXICAL STRESS

LEXICAL STORAGE

LEXICAL SEGMENTATION

LEXICAL RECOGNITION

LEXICAL ENTRY

LEXICAL EFFECT

LEXICAL ACCESS