ABSTRACT
Listening is a complex cognitive skill. That is clear from our discussion of the cognitive concepts and processing skills involved in listening comprehension in the previous chapter. Listeners must be able to process what they hear in real time and, concurrently, attend to new input. Processing of rapid speech in our first language is mostly implicit, effortless, and automatic, with little conscious attention to what we are doing as we comprehend. Only when we encounter unknown words, an unfamiliar accent, an unknown topic, or some interference in the listening environment (e.g., noise or a poor phone connection) do we think about the process more consciously. For most of us, the first real confrontation with the complexities of listening comes when we learn a new language and have to identify and remember something meaningful in a largely incomprehensible speech stream.
