ABSTRACT
For comprehension to happen, listeners need to parse the sound stream into meaningful units. This is challenging because the boundaries between words are often hard to determine. A common complaint of L2 listeners is that they have difficulty segmenting meaningful units from the sound stream. The acoustic signal comes so fast and then it is gone. In a study of listening difficulties reported by L2 listeners, eight of the ten problems were related to perception of the acoustic signal and segmenting words from the sound stream (Goh, 2000). This was particularly true for beginning-and intermediate-level listeners.
