Elements Of Listening

Most introductions to the comprehension of speech stress three elements: (i) access to vocabulary, (ii) parsing, and (iii) memory processes.

(i) Access to vocabulary / words

At one level, in order to comprehend a sentence you have to work out what the words mean. The mind has to relate the words that are heard to the information that is stored about them in the mind – their meanings, etc. For example, a native speaker can answer the question “Is the word ‘blish’ English?” almost instantaneously, somehow working through many thousands of words in a few moments. Such feats show the human mind is extraordinarily efficient at organizing the storage of words and their interconnections. The context automatically makes particular meanings of words available to us. For example, to a person reading a research article, the word “table” means a layout of figures. To someone reading about antiques it means a piece of furniture. To someone reading a surveyor’s report on a house it means the depth at which water appears in the ground, and so on. Somehow the context limits the amount of mental space that has to be searched to get the right meaning.

(ii) Parsing

Parsing refers to how the mind works out the grammatical structure and meaning of the sentences it hears. Take a sentence such as “The man ate breakfast”. To understand the sentence fully means being able to tell who is carrying out the action and what is affected by the action, and also to realize that “ate breakfast” goes together as a phrase while “man ate” does not. Even if our minds are not consciously aware of the grammatical technicalities, nevertheless they are working out the structure of the sentence automatically. Grammar is not just in the back of or minds but is active while we are listening.

The process of parsing can be either ‘bottom-up’ or ‘top-down’.

‘Bottom-up’ parsing means building the sentence up in our minds bit by bit, putting the sounds into words, the words into phrases, the phrases into a whole sentence. So “the” is put with “man” to get a noun phrase “the man”; “ate” goes with “breakfast” to get a verb phrase ““ate breakfast”; and the noun phrase “the man” and the verb phrase ““ate breakfast” go together to yield the structure of the whole sentence.

‘Top-down’ parsing on the other hand means starting from the whole sentence and breaking it down into smaller and smaller bits. Given a sentence like “The man ate breakfast”, the top-down process tries to find a noun phrase, which in turn means trying to find first an article “the” and then a noun “man”. If it succeeds, it next tries to find a verb phrase, which means trying to find a verb “ate” and a noun phrase “breakfast”. If the quest to find a noun phrase and a verb phrase succeeds, it has found a sentence, complete with its structure.

In principle, the mind could parse the sentence in either the bottom-up or the top-down direction. In practice listeners get the best of both worlds by using both types of process. Features such as the intonation pattern allow them to fit words and phrases within an overall structure, a top-down process. Particular words indicate the start of a phrase and allow them to build it up word by word, a bottom-up process.

(iii) Memory processes

The memory processes in listening are closely connected to those discussed earlier. All comprehension depends on the storing and processing of information by the minds.