Second Language Listening and Connected Speech

This chapter discusses individual differences (IDs) with specific reference to second language (L2) listening. It provides an overview of existing research on the role of a range of cognitive, conative, affective, sociocultural, and demographic learner differences for L2 listening comprehension. This literature review confirms associations between IDs such as strategy use or anxiety and L2 listening, and forms the basis for practical implications for the teaching and testing of L2 listening. At the same time, the review demonstrates the relative scarcity of research in this area, as well as the need to ground operationalizations of IDs and of L2 listening in the literature on these constructs. The chapter offers directions for future research, while highlighting the importance of validating IDs and listening assessments for their intended uses and populations in such research.

Language samples and nonverbal behavior of 50 children attending bilingual Kindergarten programs were recorded from children's conversations with a puppet on three separate occasions. In order to determine the influence of the listener's language on children's code selection, the puppet spoke a different language on each occasion. Of particular interest was the extent to which children would make pragmatic adjustments in their verbal and nonverbal language codes in response to different listener needs. Differences in code selection which could be attributed to variation in second language proficiency were explored by contrasting the behavior of children classified as monolingual, limited second language speakers, or bilingual. Distinctive behavioral variations in both verbal and nonverbal communication were found to be associated with the listener's language and the children's proficiency in a second language. The implications of this research for increasing children's pragmatic communicative effectiveness were discussed.

A signifcant proportion of listening activities in practice are interactive in nature, as it has been proven in research studies around the world. All listening activities, except for media listening, speech listening and eavesdropping, are aimed at two-way listening and speaking in direct communication. Traditionally, however, language teaching activities have often adopted a passive approach to listening comprehension, leading learners to perceive listening as a purely receptive act. This approach emphasizes the mere reception of information rather than active synthesis or clarifcation when comprehension issues arise. If learners are placed in communicative contexts, and if they can interact with the speaker to seek understanding, the teaching and learning effectiveness of language listening activities will be enhanced. For these reasons, in this article, we study the application of the interactive approach to teaching Vietnamese listening to foreigners. We review research works on interactive listening teaching and Vietnamese listening profciency tests. Then, the concepts of interaction, interactive listening and their constituent elements are clarifed. On that basis, the methods for teaching interactive Vietnamese listening are proposed. The criteria for assessing interactive listening skills of foreigners in the teaching-learning process and in testingassessment activities are also offered. The obtained results have the potential to build interactive Vietnamese listening textbooks for foreigners as well as assessment standards for interactive Vietnamese listening profciency tests. In this chapter we research on applying interactive approach to teaching Vietnamese language listening for foreigners. We examine research works on teaching interactive listening and tests for assessing language listening competence. Then, the concepts of interactive, interactive listening, and their constituent elements are clarified. Later, methods for teaching Vietnamese interactive listening are proposed. Criteria to assess the interactive listening skills of foreigners in the teaching-learning process and in testing-assessing activities are also suggested. The results obtained have the potential basis to develop interactive Vietnamese listening course-books for foreigners as well as standards for assessing tests of Vietnamese interactive listening competence.

Scholars have recommended various listening processes to help develop second language listeners’ abilities, processes that have been largely included in current listening course materials. However, there has been little research examining the usefulness of these various processes for the listeners, and therefore knowledge is lacking into which of these processes may be worth foregrounding in such courses and why. This study provides initial insights into these areas. Lower-intermediate level learners are taught in two listening courses, and then provide accounts of which strategies and skills benefitted them the most (and also the least, in some instances), and also reasons why. Learners’ views are supported by their accompanying growth in listening proficiency, and where possible, in the relevant strategy or skill they are evaluating. The study also provides information regarding the possible sequencing of some processes in a listening course.

Studying the effect of varying acoustic environments on speech perception is often challenging due to the logistical difficulties in moving participants undertaking listening tests between environments as well as lack of controllability and reproducibility in terms of the acoustics of the test environments. In addition, when the study requires to compare first and second language listeners, it often becomes infeasible due to the availability of participants with required language background in a single geographical location where the study is conducted. Virtual sound reproduction could address the challenge thanks to its ability to reproduce the acoustics of arbitrary spaces at multiple geographic locations in a controllable manner. However, it has not been studied well if the results collected using virtual sound reproduction would be a valid alternative to the results collected in real spaces. This talk will introduce a recent study that investigated the difference of speech perception in varying acoustic environments between first and second language New Zealand English listeners using virtual sound reproduction technology. The talk will particularly focus on how the results collected under virtual acoustic environments assimilates to that collected in the original real acoustic environments between first and second language listeners.

While previous studies have shown that L2 listeners tend to focus more on videos with additional information, like presentation slides, the amount of eye gaze did not necessarily translate to higher listening test scores . Unlike previous research focusing on the benefits of additional visual cues, this study explores how emotions impact L2 listeners’ viewing behavior. Sixty-four adults completed the Foreign Language Listening Anxiety Scale (FLLAS), watched three academic lectures with their eye movements tracked, and answered comprehension questions. According to the results, listening anxiety was not a significant predictor of viewing videos. The relationship between viewing time and comprehension scores was non-significant. Interviews and survey responses highlighted diverse attitudes toward the videos. The findings suggest that individual differences in listening anxiety may not significantly influence how much participants look at the videos. Furthermore, adding context videos to listening tests to increase authenticity does not seem to affect comprehension scores, consistent with previous studies. The implications for developing video-based listening tests are discussed.

There has been a growing interest in and concern for the teaching of listening in the last 40 years. Looking back over the years, we can see how the emphases on teaching listening and the focus of listening instruction have changed. Although instructional practices were initially heavily influenced by models of the written language and a behaviourist approach, the focus has since moved to developing listening as a skill needed for constructing and communicating meaning. More recently, discussions about listening instruction have emphasized the role of strategy training and learner metacognition in facilitating comprehension. In this paper I discuss a metacognitive approach, drawing on understandings from educational research as well as second language listening studies. I explain its theoretical rationale and identify principles for carrying out metacognitive instruction, as well as outline general instructional objectives and learning activities for this purpose. Finally, I suggest possible research directions for examining the role of metacognition in second language listening and the relevance of metacognitive instruction to listening development.

This study investigates cross-cultural and cross-linguistic vocal emotion recognition by testing American English and French listeners (Listener Language) listening to vocal emotions produced in Dutch and Korean (Speaker Language). Both listener groups recognized all emotions above chance, except for Pride in Korean by American English listeners (0.08), thereby supporting the Universality hypothesis (Elfenbein, H. A. 2013. Nonverbal dialects and accents in facial expressions of emotion. Emotion Review 5(1). 90-96). However, we did not find consistent patterns for Cultural Proximity (Elfenbein, H. A. & N. Ambady 2003a. Cultural similarity's consequences: A distance perspective on cross-cultural differences in emotion recognition. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 34(1). 92-110, 2002b. On the universality and cultural specificity of emotion recognition: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin 128(2). 203-235), as both groups of listeners performed similarly on average in both recordings. Likewise, the Prosodic Proximity hypothesis was not supported by our data, since French listeners did not outperform American English listeners in recognizing emotions in Korean, although French and Korean obviously share basic prosodic structures. Instead, the effect of culture and language was emotion-specific, varying across Speaker Language and/or Listener Language. Additionally, despite the significant impact of the emotional dimensions of arousal, valence, and basicness on recognition accuracy, these dimensions did not consistently predict accuracy, since individual emotions deviated from the general patterns of accuracy due to emotion-specific features. Together, these findings provide a more nuanced perspective on the relative contributions of universality, culture, language, and emotional dimensions to cross-cultural emotion recognition, especially for listeners unfamiliar with the target language.

Neural representation of pitch is influenced by lifelong experiences with music and language at both cortical and subcortical levels of processing. The aim of this article is to determine whether neural plasticity for pitch representation at the level of the brainstem is dependent upon specific dimensions of pitch contours that commonly occur as part of a native listener's language experience. Brainstem frequency following responses (FFRs) were recorded from Chinese and English participants in response to four Mandarin tonal contours presented in a nonspeech context in the form of iterated rippled noise. Pitch strength (whole contour, 250 msec; 40-msec segments) and pitch-tracking accuracy (whole contour) were extracted from the FFRs using autocorrelation algorithms. Narrow band spectrograms were used to extract spectral information. Results showed that the Chinese group exhibits smoother pitch tracking than the English group in three out of the four tones. Moreover, cross-language comparisons of pitch strength of 40-msec segments revealed that the Chinese group exhibits more robust pitch representation of those segments containing rapidly changing pitch movements across all four tones. FFR spectral data were complementary showing that the Chinese group exhibits stronger representation of multiple pitch-relevant harmonics relative to the English group across all four tones. These findings support the view that at early preattentive stages of subcortical processing, neural mechanisms underlying pitch representation are shaped by particular dimensions of the auditory stream rather than speech per se. Adopting a temporal correlation analysis scheme for pitch encoding, we propose that long-term experience sharpens the tuning characteristics of neurons along the pitch axis with enhanced sensitivity to linguistically relevant variations in pitch.

Social and communicative deficits are defining characteristics of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Some theories suggest that these challenges, among other autistic traits, may arise from differences in predictive coding, or how the brain uses context to predict and interpret incoming information. This idea has the potential to link symptoms of autism to specific neurocomputational processes, and is especially promising for communication, whose impairment is a hallmark of ASD. Here we leveraged the ability of large language models (LLMs) to quantify semantic contextualization to analyze a unique dataset of responses from hippocampal neurons obtained during language listening in three mild-to-severe autistic individuals with comorbid epilepsy. Key elements of semantic coding were preserved in all three individuals with ASD: single-neuron response dynamics, representation of word-word semantic relationships, and patterns of context-dependent shifts in meaning. However, relative to controls, ASD resulted in reduced neural signatures of contextualization: (1) neuronal responses were aligned with earlier, less contextual layers of GPT-2, (2) ASD patients had lower effective dimensionality of the neural subspace predicting semantics, (3) neural representations of word meaning were less influenced by preceding context, and (4) neural signatures of lexical surprisal were reduced. Together, these results support theories of autism that emphasize impairments in contextualization, and highlight the power of LLMs as a tool for quantifying the computational basis of neurodevelopmental disorders.

There is considerable evidence from psycholinguistics that first language listeners handle function words differently from content words. This makes intuitive sense because content words require the listener to access a lexical meaning representation whereas function words do not. A separate channel of processing for functors would enable them to be detected faster. The question is of importance to our understanding of second language (L2) listening. Because what is extracted from the input by L2 listeners is generally less than complete, it is useful for the instructor to know which parts of the signal they are likely to recognize, and which parts are likely to be lost to them. On the one hand, L2 listeners might rely heavily on function words because high frequency renders them familiar. On the other, they might have difficulty identifying function words confidently within a piece of connected speech because functors in English are usually brief and of low perceptual prominence. The current study investigated intake by intermediate‐level L2 listeners to establish whether function or content words are processed more accurately and reported more frequently. It found that the recognition of functors fell significantly behind that of lexical words. The finding was remarkably robust across first languages and across levels of proficiency, suggesting that it may reflect the way in which L2 listeners choose to distribute their attention.

When listening to speech in their native language, speakers use prior context to anticipate upcoming phonemes, words, and concepts, integrating information at the sublexical, lexical, and sentence level. While it has been suggested that late second language learners do not predict to the same extent as native listeners, adequately evaluating this claim requires measurement of predictions at these multiple levels of representation simultaneously in natural speech. We recorded magnetoencephalography (MEG) responses from native Mandarin and Sinhala speakers listening to continuous narrative English speech. We used multivariate temporal response function (mTRF) analysis to investigate whether second language listeners demonstrate the same markers of prediction in neural data as native English speakers listening to the same stimuli. We demonstrate that late second language listeners exhibit strikingly similar responses to native speakers in sensitivity to phoneme surprisal and entropy with respect to sublexical, lexical, and sentence-level context. The few small response differences we observed appear most likely to arise from specific properties of the native languages, rather than general differences between native and second-language listening. These results provide evidence that late second-language listeners indeed leverage prediction in similar ways as native listeners in understanding continuous speech. This suggests that multivariate analyses of neural data from naturalistic listening may be vital in carefully evaluating the differences and similarities in speech prediction across populations.

Nyquist, J. D., & Wulff, D. H. (1996). Working effectively with graduate assistants. Thousand Oaks, CA.: Sage, x + 146 pp. $36.00 (cloth) $ 16.95 (paper). Linn, R. (1996). A teacher's introduction to postmodernism. NCTE Teacher's Introduction Series. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, xvi + 161 pp. $12.95. O'Keefe, V. (1995). Speaking to think/thinking to speak: The importance of talk in the learning process. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. 83 pp. $25.00. Mendelsohn, D.J. & Rubin, J. (Eds.). (1995). A guide for the teaching of second language listening. San Diego, CA: Dominie Press, Inc. 236 pp. $17.95 (paper).

This study explores the question of whether native and nonnative listeners, some familiar with the language and some not, differ in their accent ratings of native speakers (NSs) and nonnative speakers (NNSs). Although a few studies have employed native and nonnative judges to evaluate native and nonnative speech, the present study is perhaps the first to include nonnative judges who were unfamiliar with the language they were judging. This study compares accent ratings of four different groups listening to Brazilian Portuguese spoken by NSs and NNSs. The 25 speakers of Portuguese were 5 NSs and 20 NNSs who were NSs of American English. The four listening groups were (a) Brazilian Portuguese listeners, (b) American English listeners with Portuguese experience, (c) American English listeners without Portuguese experience, and (d) English as a second language listeners without Portuguese experience. Although there were some differences, the results show striking similarities across groups, suggesting that listeners' first and second languages do not strongly affect ratings of foreign accents. The study also has implications for the critical period hypothesis because it raises the possibility that there are salient universal features of nonnative speech.

The present study aimed to examine the involvement of listening effort among multilinguals in their first (L1) and second (L2) languages in quiet and noisy listening conditions and investigate how the presence of a constraining context within sentences influences listening effort. A group of 46 young adult Arabic (L1)-Hebrew (L2) multilinguals participated in a listening task. This task aimed to assess participants' perceptual performance and the effort they exert (as measured through pupillometry) while listening to single words and sentences presented in their L1 and L2, in quiet and noisy environments (signal to noise ratio = 0 dB). Listening in quiet was easier than in noise, supported by both perceptual and pupillometry results. Perceptually, multilinguals performed similarly and reached ceiling levels in both languages in quiet. However, under noisy conditions, perceptual accuracy was significantly lower in L2, especially when processing sentences. Critically, pupil dilation was larger and more prolonged when listening to L2 than L1 stimuli. This difference was observed even in the quiet condition. Contextual support resulted in better perceptual performance of high-predictability sentences compared with low-predictability sentences, but only in L1 under noisy conditions. In L2, pupillometry showed increased effort when listening to high-predictability sentences compared with low-predictability sentences, but this increased effort did not lead to better understanding. In fact, in noise, speech perception was lower in high-predictability L2 sentences compared with low-predictability ones. The findings underscore the importance of examining listening effort in multilingual speech processing and suggest that increased effort may be present in multilingual's L2 within clinical and educational settings.