First Advisor

Robert H. English

Term of Graduation

Summer 1972

Date of Publication

7-28-1972

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (M.S.) in Speech: Speech and Hearing Sciences

Department

Speech

Language

English

Subjects

Listening -- Research, Children -- Language, Language acquisition, Auditory perception in children -- Analysis

DOI

10.15760/etd.1568

Physical Description

1 online resource (vii, 52 pages)

Abstract

Listening, as a communication skill, is an essential factor in the normal language development of the' child. Until recently, however, there has been very little research conducted concerning the linguistic parameters that influence the ability to listen. Thus, this investigation was designed to study the effects of two linguistic parameters, construction and semantic constraints on the verbal responses of preschool children in a dichotic listening task.

Fifteen children, between the ages of 5-3 to 6-8, were presented with four dichotic listening tasks consisting of 80 stimuli, (40 sentences and 40 pseudo-sentences). The children were asked to report the message delivered to their right ear.

The performance of the children was analyzed according to the F-Test and the Test of Least Significant Difference. The results showed that construction errors were the only statistically significant errors (P < .05) among the six types of error types counted in the listening tasks.

There were fewer construction errors made when there was a meaningful message to report than when there was a non-meaningful one. Although the semantic parameters were not statistically significant in this study, other investigations have demonstrated their influence on the report of subjects in a dichotic listening task. Therefore, a future research project should be conducted placing a greater emphasis on the semantic parameters.

Additionally, a three level listening hierarchy was found. It was based upon the number of construction errors that occurred among the four dichotic listening tasks. This writer feels that future research should pursue the question of an existing hierarchy among dichotic listening tasks. Such an investigation, however, should utilize a larger population than the population tested in this study.

Rights

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

Comments

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Speech: Emphasis in Speech Pathology/Audiology.

If you are the rightful copyright holder of this dissertation or thesis and wish to have it removed from the Open Access Collection, please submit a request to pdxscholar@pdx.edu and include clear identification of the work, preferably with URL.

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/10692

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