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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:pdx.edu/oai:pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu:open_access_etds-2568 |
| Date | 28 July 1972 |
| Creators | Weber, Peggy J. |
| Publisher | PDXScholar |
| Source Sets | Portland State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Dissertations and Theses |
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