Level of Listening Comprehension as a Function of Two Process Variables: Syntax and Meaningfulness

Abstract

The study was designed to investigate three aspects of listening comprehension. One aim of the experiment was to replicate the results of past research showing that semantic and syntactic processes are separate. A second aim of the study was to determine whether "probe-latency" data could assess "level of comprehension". A third aspect of the experiment was to index the relationship between age and changes in the syntactic-semantic process. The results of this study show (a) that the semantic and syntactic processes are separate, (b) that the "probe-latency" data do assess "level of comprehension" and (c) that age levels of subjects in this experiment had no clear differential influence on syntactic and semantic processing.

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