The Handbook of Listening

Debra L. Worthington, Graham D. Bodie, Debra L. Worthington, Graham D. Bodie

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781119554158
  9781119554141
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119554165
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

A unique academic reference dedicated to listening, featuring current research from leading scholars in the field

The Handbook of Listening is the first cross-disciplinary academic reference on the subject, gathering the current body of scholarship on listening in one comprehensive volume. This landmark work brings together current and emerging research from across disciples to provide a broad overview of foundational concepts, methods, and theoretical issues central to the study of listening. The Handbook offers diverse perspectives on listening from researchers and practitioners in fields including architecture, linguistics, philosophy, audiology, psychology, and interpersonal communication.

Detailed yet accessible chapters help readers understand how listening is conceptualized and analyzed in various disciplines, review the listening research of current scholars, and identify contemporary research trends and areas for future study. Organized into five parts, the Handbook begins by describing different methods for studying listening and examining the disciplinary foundations of the field. Chapters focus on teaching listening in different educational settings and discuss listening in a range of contexts. Filling a significant gap in listening literature, this book:

• Highlights the multidisciplinary nature of listening theory and research
• Features original chapters written by a team of international scholars and practitioners
• Provides concise summaries of current listening research and new work in the field
• Explores interpretive, physiological, phenomenological, and empirical approaches to the study of listening
• Discusses emerging perspectives on topics including performative listening and augmented reality

An important contribution to listening research and scholarship, The Handbook of Listening is an essential resource for students, academics, and practitioners in the field of listening, particularly communication studies, as well as those involved in linguistics, language acquisition, and psychology.

PART I
Methodological Approaches

This part contains four chapters that delineate the primary methods used to study listening: physiological approaches, phenomenological approaches, interpretive approaches, and empirical approaches. Each chapter (i) focuses on the philosophical underpinnings of the methodological approach; (ii) provides an overview of specific methods within that approach; (iii) discusses relevant design and analysis decisions; (iv) reviews common ways listening research does or does not meet current standards of practice; and (v) offers recommendations for future study and/or means of improving future research.

1
Physiological Approaches

Susan Teubner‐Rhodesand Stefanie E. Kuchinsky¹

Listening involves more than just hearing. Sound waves induce changes in the hair cells of the ear, which then must be transformed into an abstract understanding of the speaker’s message (see Hurley, this volume). During typical listening, acoustic, linguistic, and cognitive processes are engaged to varying degrees. These processes adapt when faced with adverse listening conditions (e.g., background noise, accented speech; Mattys, Davis, Bradlow, & Scott, 2012). Indeed, distinctions are often made between the perception, recognition, and understanding of speech materials (see Imhof, this volume).

Many audiological assessments of listening‐related deficits utilize self‐report and behavioral tests of auditory function, such as when individuals are asked to identify pure tones or words. These measures are straightforward to collect and are diagnostic of myriad communication‐related deficits. Even individuals that do not meet diagnostic criteria for a hearing or language impairment can experience substantial difficulty listening in challenging conditions, such as background noise. In such cases, individuals may increasingly engage top‐down resources as they work harder to maintain high levels of performance. Sustaining such listening effort could result in fatigue and disengagement from social interactions (McGarrigle et al., 2014), especially for older adults and individuals with hearing loss or other communication disorders. These findings suggest that hearing assessments may be complemented by also measuring the extent to which higher‐order brain functions compensate for degraded acoustic input in order to support accurate speech understanding.

This chapter focuses on physiological methods used to track the function of the central nervous system during listening. They include, but are not limited to, indirect or direct measures of cortical or subcortical activity (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging [fMRI], Magnetoencephalography/Electroencephalography [M/EEG]), or autonomic nervous system function (pupillometry). As will be described, these measures provide varying degrees of temporal and spatial precision about when and where processes occur in the brain during listening. By improving our understanding of the mechanisms that contribute to healthy communication, physiological measures improve our ability to detect and remediate problems for individuals who experience listening difficulties.

fMRI Approaches to Listening

fMRI is based on the principle that as people perform a task, cerebral blood flow to local brain regions increases with neuronal activity (see Bandettini, 2012;

Fox, 2012 for review). As this blood supply arrives, the concentration of oxygenated to deoxygenated blood slowly increases over the course of several seconds, peaks, and then begins to return to baseline levels (Buckner, 1998; Fox & Raichle, 1986). This Gaussian‐shaped signal is called the Blood‐Oxygen Level Dependent (BOLD) response. Changes in the BOLD signal, as a result of varying stimuli or task demands, indirectly reflect neuronal activity associated with those stimulating tasks and events (Ogawa et al., 1992). The Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner captures the BOLD signal by acquiring a three‐dimensional image of the entire brain (i.e., a whole‐brain volume) at regular intervals throughout a task. MRI has good spatial resolution (1–3 mm³), but poor temporal precision due to the time it takes for the BOLD signal to unfold.

Design Considerations for Auditory fMRI

The advent of the event‐related design for fMRI revolutionized cognitive neuroscience research. Event‐related designs present different types of stimuli in rapid succession, with inter‐trial intervals as short as two seconds. BOLD responses to such rapidly‐presented stimuli overlap in time, but researchers can use advanced statistical techniques to isolate BOLD activity associated with an individual stimulus or event (Buckner, 1998; Dale & Buckner, 1997).

A major consideration for fMRI studies of listening is that the scanner produces a loud, sustained sound while collecting back‐to‐back three‐dimensional images (i.e., volumes) of the brain. This noise poses a particular challenge for auditory fMRI because it partly masks auditory stimuli (Edmister, Talavage, Ledden, & Weisskoff, 1999). Moreover, this task‐irrelevant scanner noise elicits a robust BOLD response in auditory cortex, which limits the magnitude of the BOLD response to target auditory stimuli (Di Salle et al., 2003). Neuroscientists have therefore adopted special image acquisition protocols that allow presentation of stimuli in relative quiet. Most of these methods fall under the category of “sparse sampling” in which whole‐brain images are collected less often, sacrificing some temporal precision in order to present stimuli in relative quiet in between the noisy scans (Edmister et al., 1999; Hall et al., 1999).

In sparse sampling approaches, the time between scans (e.g., 8 or more seconds; also called repetition time) is much longer than the time it takes to acquire each whole‐brain volume (e.g., 2 seconds). This allows auditory stimuli to be presented in the relatively silent period between noisy scans. Because the BOLD response peaks about 6 seconds after stimulus onset (Banich & Compton, 2018), delaying image acquisition in this manner allows for the capture of the maximum BOLD amplitude, but not the rest of the BOLD response. As a method, sparse sampling yields robust BOLD responses to auditory stimulation (Edmister et al., 1999; Hall et al., 1999), but has poorer temporal resolution. Additionally, sparse sampling requires longer sampling intervals, which restrict the number of trials that can be presented within an experiment and reduces the statistical power of the study.

Researchers have adopted several alternatives to address the limitations associated with sparse sampling. One approach is to shorten the quiet interval between scans. For instance, Orfanidou, Marslen‐Wilson, and Davis (2006) presented spoken words in a 1.4 second “silent” period within a 2.5 second repetition time to identify regions where word repetition was associated with lower brain activity. However, this design is only appropriate for studies that meet certain conditions. First, the auditory stimuli were isolated words: longer utterances require longer intervals between scans to preserve acoustical integrity and avoid acoustic masking and scanner‐induced activity in auditory cortex. Second, shortening the scan interval allowed more trials to be presented, providing sufficient statistical power. Finally, participants responded manually: or...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• About the Editors
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I: Methodological Approaches
• PART II: Disciplinary Foundations
• PART III: Teaching Listening
• PART IV: Contexts and Applications
• PART V: Emerging Perspectives
• Epilogue Moving Toward Listening Literacy
• Index
• End User License Agreement