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The Effect of Time-Compressed Speech on Comprehensive, Interpretative and Short-Term Listening

Contemporary definitions of human listening suggest that it is a multi-dimensional phenomenon. Short-term and interpretative listening may be viewed as important aspects of the listening process. However, research in time-compressed speech has focused on listening comprehension while not adequately treating other important types of listening. A broader view of the listening process would include all of the skills considered relevant to everyday human communication. This study examined the effect of time-compressed speech on comprehensive, interpretative and short-term listening. The Kentucky Comprehensive Listening Test was used to measure the three types of listening. Cut and splice tape editing was employed in the development of four master test tapes: a control tape presented at normal rate and tapes with test stimuli time-compressed by 30%, 45%, and 60%. Each of four randomly selected groups, 120 total subjects, was exposed to one of the four test tapes. The data from the test administrations was analyzed by analysis-of-variance and simple means tests. Results indicate that a statistically significant amount of the variance in comprehensive, interpretative and short-term listening scores may be explained by the manipulated variable, time-compression. However, the amount of variance-accounted-for is relatively low for both short-term and interpretative listening. Closer examination of the data indicates that short-term and interpretative listening test scores do not significantly decay until a high level of time-compression (60%) is reached. Conversely, in the case of comprehensive listening, a relatively linear relation exists between degree of time-compression and test scores. Significant drops in mean scores were found at more moderate levels of time-compression. The findings are discussed in light of differences between short-term and long-term memory. Comprehensive listening, which relies upon long-term memory, may suffer from a lack of adequate processing and encoding time which may be induced by time-compression. Short-term and Interpretative listening are processes which rely primarily on short-term memory and may not be adversely affected until a level of time-compression is reached which impairs intelligibility. Implications are noted for future research and for educational applications.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:unt.edu/info:ark/67531/metadc330860
Date08 1900
CreatorsKing, Paul Elvin
ContributorsLumsden, D. Barry, Powers, William G., Miller, William A., Miller, Bob W.
PublisherNorth Texas State University
Source SetsUniversity of North Texas
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis or Dissertation
Formatv, 64 leaves : ill., Text
RightsPublic, King, Paul Elvin, Copyright, Copyright is held by the author, unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved.

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