ABSTRACT
D. P. Brown, a blind educator, completed his doctoral dissertation 30 years ago at Stanford University. In it, he analyzed relationships among oral and written language skills (Brown, 1954). He argued that listening to and comprehending spoken language is different from listening to nonlanguage sounds, which is something the prelanguage infant can do. He argued that, just as reading is not called looking, though it certainly involves looking while processing language symbols, listening while processing language signals should not be called merely listening. Listening, so he argued, is a parallel term to looking, and it causes confusion to have the term also serve as the oral language counterpart to reading. So, he coined the term auding to refer to the process of listening to language and processing it for comprehension.
