Listening is an important language skill to develop in terms of second language acquisition (SLA). In spite of its importance, second language (L2) learners often regard listening as the most difficult language skill to learn. This paper reviews a variety of recent research on listening comprehension to provide a basis for creating more effective listening instruction. It begins with a brief di...

Prevention of dementia due to Alzheimer's disease (d/AD) requires interventions that slow the disease process prior to symptom onset. To develop such interventions, one needs metrics that assess pre-symptomatic disease progression. Familiar measures of progression include cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biochemical and imaging analyses, as well as cognitive testing. Changes in the latter can sometime...

This study addresses the roles of segment deletion, durational reduction, and frequency of use in the comprehension of morphologically complex words. We report two auditory lexical decision experiments with reduced and unreduced prefixed Dutch words. We found that segment deletions as such delayed comprehension. Simultaneously, however, longer durations of the different parts of the words ap­ p...

Single words, familiar phrases (idioms and speech formulas), and novel sentences (matched to the familiar phrases in length, frequency, and structure) were selected for a picture-matching auditory comprehension task and administered to left- and right-brain damaged (LBD, RBD) subjects. The groups did not differ in single word comprehension. A 2 x 2 ANOVA revealed opposite patterns on the two ot...

Speech comprehension has been shown to be a strikingly bilateral process, but the differential contributions of the subfields of left and right auditory cortices have remained elusive. The hypothesis that left auditory areas engage predominantly in decoding fast temporal perturbations of a signal whereas the right areas are relatively more driven by changes of the frequency spectrum has not bee...

This study investigates the optimal timing of audio-visual presentation for text comprehension. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to read and/or hear the expository passages in three conditions; visually presented, auditorily presented, and audio-visually presented condition. Comprehension performance in audio-visual presentation condition was not different from that in visual or auditor...

This article presents a focused review of language, speech, and comprehension outcomes in children with cochlear implants. Language acquisition with early-age implants and later-age implants are discussed, along with literacy and comprehension skills. A wide range of language outcomes is possible for children with cochlear implants, but many can achieve listening and spoken language skills at t...