Teaching and Assessing Listening - Week 2 - Linguistic Processing

Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 2 of the course Teaching and Assessing Listening for the master's in English teaching at ULACIT term IIICO 2022. In today's class we will explore some of the factors involved in linguistic processing of spoken input. In order to do that, we will need to review some of the key features of spoken language and consider the bottom-up and top-down processing model that explains how listeners combine information from the input with their background knowledge to construct meaning.  

Today's Goals:

• Describe the defining features of spoken language compared to written language.
• Analyze a short segment of spoken language by dividing it into intonation units and identifying the focal point and intonation pattern.
• Review common phonological processes that are characteristics of connected speech.
• Consider the bottom-up and top-down processing model as a process that integrates linguistic and semantic processing.

Guiding Questions: 

• How is spoken language different from written language and what explains those differences?
• How does the concept of the intonation unit help us better understand speech production and processing?
• How do the sounds of a word change when pronounced in fluent speech rather than in isolation?
• How does the bottom-up and top-down processing model help explain how listeners construct meaning?

Warm Up: Beginning Listening

Being a beginner language learner comes with many challenges. Let's put yourself in a beginner's shoes by watching this short video.

• What are your immediate thoughts about the video? How did you feel as you watched it?
• Do you remember what it was like to be beginner listener in a second language?
• What words were you able to pick out?
• What additional information could you infer through tone, facial expression, context, or other clues?

Topic 1: Retelling through Keywords

Last week you were exposed to a large amount of theory and new vocabulary. It can be a lot to process at once. Click on your group document and work with your partners to match keywords from last week's lesson with their definitions or examples. Then discuss the questions.

• Group 1: CLICK HERE
• Group 2: CLICK HERE
• Group 3: CLICK HERE

• Concept Review: CLICK HERE

• Because attention is a critical component of listening, we can say that listening is informed by both the external world and our internal reality. Consciousness is "the bridge between these two sources of knowledge (p. 8)." Consciousness involves two cognitive processes:

• Identification: "The brain identifies an outside object of revent as consisting of independent properties."
• Agency: "The brain sets up the listener as the central agent who willingly and purposefully witnesses this object or event.

• "Consciousness is experienced as a continuous force that links contact with the internal and external environments and allows the experiencer to make sense of these encounters and to direct them (p.9)."

Importance of Consciousness in Describing Listening

Properties of Consciousness: Click the group link below to explore some additional assumptions about the nature of consciousness.

• Group Link: CLICK HERE

• "Our consciousness can interact with only one source of information at a time, although we can readly and rapidly switch back and forth between different sources, and even bundle disparate sources into a single focus of attention. Whenever multiple stources, or streams, of information are present, selective attention must be used in order to allow our working memory to function coherently. Selective attention involves a descision, a commitment of our limited capacity process to one stram of information or one bundled set of features (p. 12)."

Topic 2: Introduction to Linguistic Processing

Let's take a moment to review some of the concepts from your assigned reading. Click the group link below and follow the instructions in the document. Feel free to have your study guide handy in case you want to reference it.

• Group Link: CLICK HERE

Topic 3: Importance of Prosodic Features of Spoken Language

Prosody is the study of the rhythm, stress, and intonation patterns that are characteristics of spoken language. Beyond the individual words we hear, prosody provides listeners with valuable information that is essential to comprehend speaker intentions and collaborate in conversation. Click the group link below and follow your teacher's instructions.

• Group Link: CLICK HERE 

Now let's explore the topic of intonation units by analyzing your own language sample.

• Group 1: CLICK HERE
• Group 2: CLICK HERE

Topic 4: Word Recognition and Phonotactics

Being able to automatically recognize words adds to listening fluency, but how does word recognition work and what segmentation strategies do listeners use to identify word boundaries? What pronunciation features of connected speech cause difficulties for L2 listeners? Let's find out. 

• “Although all aspects of speech recognition are important contributors to comprehension, under conditions of noise or other perceptual stress, or when sounds are ambiguous or degraded and marginally intelligible (especially for L2 listeners, when syntax is indecipherable), listeners will tend to focus on and rely on lexical information alone (p. 27).”

• “In listening to continuous speech there is not direct auditory equivalent to the white spaces between words encountered when reading continuous text. Because there are no reliable cues marking every word boundary, word recognition is initially an approximating processed marked by continual uncertainty (p. 29).” 

• How do we recognize words? Through the interaction between perceived sound and understood likelihood that a word will appear in this context.

• When a word is recognized, it locates the onset of the following word.
• It also provides syntactic and semantic constraints that facilitate the predicting of the next word.

• Segmentation is the process of identifying word boundaries. What is the  preferred lexical segmentation strategy in English? 

• Listen for syllable stress. 
• 90% of English content words stress the first syllable or are monosyllabic. 
• Stress then, can indicate the start of a new word.

Let's test this out! Click the group link below and follow your teacher's instructions.

• Group Link: CLICK HERE 

Now let's explore the phonological processes of elision and assimilation. Click your group link.

• Group 1: CLICK HERE
• Group 2: CLICK HERE

Topic 5: Final Thoughts

The chapter ends by discussing sytactic parsing and the bottom-up/top-down information processing model. 

• Nearly every utterance you ever hear is novel. Unless you listen to a recorded message, the content, organization, prosody, vocal qualities (psychoacoustic effects), and pronunciation in spoken input make each statement you hear unique.

• "Novel expressions can be understood solely because the underlying linguistic system that the listener has acquired provides computational processes for generating stable linguistic structures (Rost, 2016, p. 37)." 

• Listeners identify cues in the input to create a "syntactic mapping of the incoming speech onto a grammatical model (p. 36)."

• This process occurs in two passes: sentence level and discourse level.

• Sentence Level Cues: word order, subject verb matching, pronoun antecedent matching, case inflections (I vs me), morphology (ed endings), etc. 

• Discourse Level Cues: organizational markers for coherence and cohesion, anaphoric reference (mentioned previously), cataphoric reference (to be mentioned), and exophoric references (external to the text).

• This creates a syntactic reference frame or activates "an automatized syntactic reference frame" which is then used to make logical inferences about the meaning of what is being said and avoid the necessity to process each detail of the input separately.

• Familiarity with formulaic language and pragmatic understanding of common communicative functions and routines help create activate these automatized reference frames.

• Bottom-Up and Top Down Processing:  This popular information processing model from psychology, linguistics, and computer science helps explain the two information sources that need to be integrated in order to make sense of a text. 

• Bottom-Up: Information from the text
• Top-Down: Information from context/expectations, linguistic knowledge, content knowledge

Click to view full sized image.

References:

Rost, M. (2026). Teaching and Researching Listening (3rd ed.). Routledge.