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There is lack of agreement as to what constitutes listening, and this has spawned over 50 definitions and models for listening (Glenn, 1989;Witkin, 1990), but not one testable theory. Most models and definitions were developed in the early 1970s, when listening researchers grounded their work in the popular attention and memory theorists of the day. These theorists proposed linear attention and memory models with the notion of short-term memory/long-term memory (Driver, 200 1). However, no definition or model is grounded in working memory theory (WM), introduced by Baddeley and Hitch (1974), which is the dominant theoretical paradigm of attention and memory research. WM theory posits a fixed-capacity system accounting for both processing and storage functions.This study ( N = 26) introduces the Conversational Listening Span instrument, the first relational listening instrument grounded in working memory theory. Scores are compared to traditional language-processing span tasks used to measure working memory capacity. Results indicate that the CLS instrument shows promise in future listening research.