Listening Comprehension

Synonyms

Comprehension; Receptive language; Spoken language comprehension

Definition

Listening comprehension encompasses the multiple processes involved in understanding and making sense of spoken language. These include recognizing speech sounds, understanding the meaning of individual words, and/or understanding the syntax of sentences in which they are presented. Listening comprehension can also involve the prosody with which utterances are spoken (which can, e.g., change intended meaning from a statement to a question), and making relevant inferences based on context, real-world knowledge, and speaker-specific attributes (e.g., to what information the speaker has access and about what he/she is likely to be talking). For longer stretches of language or discourse, listening comprehension also involves significant memory demands to keep track of causal relationships expressed within the discourse. It is often viewed as an active process with three main components: attending to the...