Listening Processes

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Traditional definitions of listening have emphasized foreground attention, face-to-face communication, often with reference to speech.

Wolvin & Coakley (1993): "listening always involves a basic process of receiving, attending to, and assigning meaning to messages" with the following types:

- discriminative (distinguishing auditory stimuli)
- comprehensive (understanding messages)
- therapeutic (empathic)
- critical (evaluation)
- appreciative (gaining a sensory impression; e.g. "listening to music, environmental sounds or to a television program"
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Ballas & Howard (along with other experimental psychologists, e.g. S. McAdams, W. Gaver) have tested human auditory competence in extracting meaning from environmental sounds.

Some strategies (following linguistic competence):

- bottom-up: feature detection, spectral & temporal pattern recognition, stream segregation

- top-down: expectations/competence, syntax, causal and contextual knowledge (use to reduce ambiguity), familiarity
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Levels of Listening Attention

Background <--------------------------------> Foreground
Background Listening <--------------> "Listening in Readiness" <------------------> "Listening in Search"

Note: - right side of diagram indicates foreground and analytical listening modes
- left side of diagram indicates background and distracted listening modes
- "listening in readiness" suggests a motion from left to right
- can "inner" or silent listening tap into long-term memory with no auditory input?

MRI/PET images indicating areas of greatest activation when tones are played during sleep;
the left area is the primary auditory cortex, the right area is the frontal lobe which controls executive functions (attention, motor planning)