The relationship between listening comprehension of text and sentences in preschoolers: Specific or mediated by lower and higher level components?

Abstract

Two studies explored the relation between listening comprehension of text and listening comprehension of sentences in preschoolers aged 4 to 5 years, 11 months. The first study analyzed this relationship taking into account the role of lower level components, namely, word knowledge and verbal working memory, as possible mediators. These components specifically accounted for listening text comprehension, whereas sentence comprehension did not. Given that sentences forming a text are not processed in isolation but in context, the second study explored the role of the ability to use linguistic context, a higher level component, in listening comprehension of text and sentences. Listening sentence comprehension was facilitated by the use of context, which accounted for individual differences in listening text comprehension. Overall, results showed that listening text comprehension is related to lower level as well as higher level components, whereas listening sentence comprehension does not play a specific role.

What Is Listening Comprehension and What Does It Take to Improve Listening Comprehension?

“…Although these have been primarily examined in the context of reading comprehension, recent studies indicate that these language and cognitive skills are also related to children's listening comprehension. Evidence includes working memory (Florit et al, 2009(Florit et al, , 2013Kim, 2016 ;Was & Woltz, 2007 ), vocabulary (Florit et al, 2009 ;Florit, Roch, & Levorato, 2014 ;Kendeou, Bohn-Gettler, White, & van den Broek, 2008 ;Kim, 2016 ;Tompkins et al, 2013 ), grammatical knowledge (Carrow-Woolfolk, 1999 ;Kim, 2015Kim, , 2016Tunmer, 1989 ), inference (Florit et al, 2014 ;Kendeou et al, 2008 ;Kim, 2016 ;Lepola et al, 2012 ;Tompkins et al, 2013 ), theory of mind (Kim, 2015(Kim, , 2016Kim & Phillips, 2014 ) and comprehension monitoring (Kim, 2015 ;Kim & Phillips, 2014 ). It is of note that these theoretical models assume that the same processes are hypothesized to be involved in text comprehension across languages.…”

“…A downside of this approach (examining unique contributions using multiple regression) is that indirect contributions of potentially very important skills are easily masked. For instance, working memory has been hypothesized to be important to listening comprehension (Daneman & Merikle, 1996 ;Graesser et al, 1994 ;Kintsch, 1988 ;van den Broek et al, 2005 ) and empirical evidence supports this hypothesis (Florit et al, 2009(Florit et al, , 2013Was & Woltz, 2007 ). Then, is its infl uence on listening comprehension direct or is its infl uence partly or completely mediated by other skills that have been shown to be important to listening comprehension such as vocabulary and inference (e.g., Florit et al, 2014 ;Kendeou et al, 2008 ;Lepola et al, 2012 ;Tompkins et al, 2013 )?…”

“…In contrast, our understanding of listening comprehension has been limited. Recent emerging evidence, however, indicates that listening comprehension is a higher-order skill that requires multiple language (including vocabulary) and cognitive skills (Florit, Roch, & Levorato, 2013 ;Kim, 2015Kim, , 2016Kim & Phillips, 2014 ;Lepola, Lynch, Laakkonen, Silvén, & Niemi, 2012 ;Tompkins, Guo, & Justice, 2013 ). In this chapter, listening comprehension is defi ned as one's ability to comprehend spoken language 1 at the discourse level -including conversations, stories (i.e., narratives), and informational oral texts -that involves the processes of extracting and constructing meaning.…”

The relations between lower and higher level comprehension skills and their role in prediction of early reading comprehension.

“…Grammar predicts reading com prehension longitudinally alongside vocabulary in children be tween the ages of 5 and 6 years (Muter et al, 2004) but not in older readers between 7 and 11 years when in competition with vocab ulary and higher level skills (Oakhill & Cain, 2012). When exam ining grammar's concurrent contribution to 5-year-olds' listening comprehension, the data are also contradictory: in some studies, grammar does not predict variance in listening comprehension when in competition with vocabulary and measures of verbal working memory (Florit, Roch, & Levorato, 2013), whereas in other studies it does (Potocki, Ecalle, & Magnan, 2013). These discrepant findings may have arisen because the measures of grammar in these studies tapped different things: understanding of different syntactic structures was assessed directly in the studies that did not find a unique relationship (Florit et al, 2013;Oakhill & Cain, 2012), whereas reflection on the sense of sentences or how well they are formed, which is a metalinguistic skill, was the measure used in the studies that did find a unique relationship (Muter et al, 2004;Potocki et al, 2013).…”

Should We Use Sentence- or Text-Level Tasks to Measure Oral Language Proficiency in Year-One Students following Whole-Class Intervention?

“…Consequently, it was hypothesized that all students would demonstrate progress on these measures [2, 44]. Past studies suggest that oral narrative tasks require children to draw upon a number of foundational oral language skills and working memory skills [52, 55]. Based on this knowledge, it was anticipated that the oral narrative task would be more sensitive in identifying oral language difficulties than a sentence-level task.…”