Teaching and Assessing Listening - Week 3 - Semantic Processing

Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 3 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 the process of meaning creation when processing spoken input including schema theory, inferencing and reasoning, and what is needed for acceptable understanding.

Today's Goals:

• Explore the role of prosody in highlighting new versus given information.
• Compare your conceptual activation spaces in response to a given stimulus.
• Analyze conversation transcripts to identify the use of cohesion devices and inferences needed for adequate comprehension.
• Discuss the bi-modal nature of listening comprehension and its implications for the teaching and assessment of listening.

Guiding Questions: 

• How do listeners identify new information and background information from paralinguistic cues in the input?
• How are the conceptual schemata activated in my mind in response to a word similar and different to those of my classmates?
• How do listeners use inference and attention to cohesion devices to make sense of discourse?
• How do the unique properties of bi-modal sensory processing help explain some of the challenges of traditional approaches to teaching and assessing listening comprehension?

Warm Up: Forced Associations

A large portion of today's class deals with how we make use of an associative network of interrelated concepts in our memory to comprehend new information. Let's review some of the concepts from last week through a game that requires to make some interesting associations. Click the group link below.

•  Group Link: CLICK HERE

• Spoken Language vs Written Language
• Intonation Unit
• Prosody
• Segmentation

Topic 1: Catch Up on What we Missed Last Week!

Because of time, we were not able to complete all of our tasks from last week. Let's quickly go over that important information now.

• Phonological Reduction: CLICK HERE

Syntactic Parsing

• 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.

Topic 2: Introduction to Semantic 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. Please have your study guide handy in case you need to reference it.

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

Topic 3: Memory, Associations, and Comprehension

Today's class is all about the process of meaning making and how we make sense of the world through processing the sensory input we receive. Watch this video carefully and be ready to report your reaction to the class.

• Describe your initial understanding of what you were watching.

• How did the final moments of the video change what you were thinking?

• Now let's watch another version of this video. How does knowing how the effect works change the way you interpret the structure of dragon now? (CLICK HERE)

• This visual example shows how we comprehend sensory input by activating assumptions about the world in the form of concepts in our long term memory. However, our comprehension breaks down when we are presented with information that contradicts the concept that we have based our assumptions on.

Let's dive deeper into the topics of comprehension and schema theory. Click the group link below.

• Group Link: CLICK HERE

Remember that last week we discussed the intonation unit? Let's have another look at how speakers subconsciously use prosody to indicate new versus given information in their short bursts of speech.

• Given Information: What the speaker assumes to already be activated in the listener's working memory. It is indicated through a rising or what is also called a referring tone.

• New Information: What the speaker assumes is not currently activated in your working memory. It is indicated through a falling or what is also known as a proclaiming town.

Anlaysis of Prosodic Features of Speech

• Group Link: CLICK HERE

• Quote: "Because comprehension involves the mapping of references that the speaker uses, the process of comprehending occurs in an ongoing cycle of updating mental representations, as the listener attends to speech (p. 50)."

• "Without this interplay of new and given, there can be no meaningful updating, and no comprehension (p. 50)."

Topic 4: Inference, Use of Conventional Cohesion Devices, and Reasoning

The author also tells us that inference and attention to cohesion devices helps us connect the dots and build understanding of discourse. Click your group link below and follow the instructions in the document.

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

Topic 5: Importance of Visual Input

Let's also consider the role of visual input during listening in the meaning making process. Watch the video below and be ready to share your reactions with the class.

• What are your reactions to the experiment?

• The McGurk Effect shows the powerful effect visual stimuli can have on interpretation of auditory input. In this case, the experiment shows how our brains can be tricked but let's also consider the ways in which the visual input helps the listener.

• My lip reading habit in intermediate Spanish.

• Quote: “Speech processing is aided by consistent visual signals from the speaker, in the form of both gestures and articulatory movements (of the mouth, lips, cheeks, chin, throat, chest) that correspond to production of speech. Because of the importance of visual cues, psycholinguists consider face-to-face and audio-visual speech perception to be seamlessly bi-modal, involving an interplay of auditory and visual senses (p. 55).”

• “Consistent with the principle of integration, when visual cues are completely absent (as in listening on the telephone), acoustic mishearings and other comprehension problems are significantly higher than in face-to-face delivery of messages (p. 56).”

• Consider the contexts in which humans listened to speech for the vast majority of the estimated 200,000+ years that we have had language. How might this fact the evolution of this bi-modal processing?

• Now consider the novel listening situations generated by technological advances in the last 100 years. How have they changed the kinds of listening scenarios we face?

• How might this evolved strategy of bi-modal processing be underserved in the ways that listening comprehension is taught and assessed in the traditional language classroom?

Topic 6: Final Thoughts

Let's finish today's class by coming back to the two information processing orientations that help us construct meaning from what we hear and read. Next week we will consider even more top-down processes related to how we use knowledge of social conventions in communication (pragmatics) to interpret what we hear.

• Quote: “This chapter has outlined the semantic, meaning-oriented processes involved in comprehension. This meaning level of processing that originates in the listener’s memory is often called top-down processing in contrast to characterizing the linguistic level, which originates in the speech signal, as bottom-up processing. If there is a misunderstanding during the listening process, we can often consider the ‘what’ is misunderstood to be the actual linguistic elements and the ‘why’ it is misunderstood as the semantic processing (p. 64).”

References:

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