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System 36 (2008) 10–21

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SYSTEM

Selective listening

Gillian Brown

University of Cambridge, Clare College, Trinity Lane, Cambridge CB2 1TL, United Kingdom

Received 20 February 2007; received in revised form 2 September 2007; accepted 19 November 2007

Abstract

In this paper, I describe research findings showing that young L1 listeners adopt various differentstrategies in differently structured situations. In particular, I show that nouns, particularly argumentnouns, appear to be preferentially selected for attention when subjects are asked to listen understressful conditions. Less academically successful listeners continue to prefer information containedin argument nouns even when this conflicts with more extended information in prepositionalphrases. They also tend to select a positive interpretation, even when the speaker has marked thecontent with a modal intended to convey uncertainty. The implications for second language listenersare discussed.� 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Selective listening; Attention; L1 listening; L2 listening; Processing load

1. Introduction

In this paper I report research findings on language processing by young L1 studentsworking in their own language. This may seem surprising in a volume addressed to thoseconcerned with L2 listening. It is clear that L1 listeners, no matter which L1 is at issue,have an immense advantage in that they are able to decode most L1 input automatically,without having to expend much processing energy in identifying words and phrases. Theyalso have the advantage of being familiar with many aspects of local culture, ways of talk-ing about the world, expressing opinions, and so on. However, it is not the case that allyoung L1 speakers are equally expert at processing what they hear, as I shall show. By

0346-251X/$ - see front matter � 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.system.2007.11.002

E-mail address: GB115@cam.ac.uk

G. Brown / System 36 (2008) 10–21 11

studying L1 success in listening, we may be able to identify useful strategies for L2 learn-ers. By noting strategies which are overgeneralised by less successful L1 listeners, we maybe able to identify stages in a progression towards more competent listening, which wouldequally apply to listening to a second language.

2. Hearing and listening

The term ‘selective listening’ might be interpreted in a number of ways. For instance, weall, as listeners to our own L1 or to a second language, do not listen, in the sense of ‘payingattention’ to everything we hear. You can walk through a crowded market chatting toyour companion and be quite oblivious of the detail of the banging, shouting, barteringand other conversations that surround you – you are aware that there is background noisebut it mostly remains just that – unanalysed background noise which you pay no attentionto (the ‘cocktail party effect’). You ‘hear’ background noise while you ‘listen’ and payattention to what your companion says. Another type of selective listening arises whenwe fail to pay a consistent degree of attention to a speaker who is taking a long turn ofspeech, like a lecture or a conference talk (Brown, 2000). We mentally ‘drift off’ for variousreasons. A few people seem to be capable of concentrated and focused listening for longperiods of time but many of us are not, particularly when listening to a second languagewhere so much available processing capacity is taken up by basic requirements like chunk-ing the discourse into comprehensible phrases and trying to identify the most significantwords.

The aspect of selective listening discussed in this paper concerns which parts of a par-ticular message L1 listeners elect to pay attention to and which parts of the message theytend to skim over or to ignore when they are under some form of informational load whichis so great that they cannot process all the information in the speech signal. These are pres-sures which will be shared by L2 listeners in similar circumstances, and indeed a muchsmaller informational load may trigger similar behaviour when one is coping in a secondlanguage, where processing capacity is already stretched just by trying to identify bits oflanguage and working out what the speaker must mean from what you have understood.

I shall be discussing evidence for processing strategies drawn not only from L1 listeningbut also from L1 reading, since I believe that they illuminate generalisable patterns ofbehaviour. It will become clear as we go along, and I look at different aspects of processingincoming language signals, that some subjects listening to their own language employmore successful strategies than others in determining how much detail they need to extractfrom the signal and what sort of detail they should be focusing on for a particular purposein a particular context. We can learn a good deal about how humans listen in different con-texts by studying what subjects do when listening to their own language being spoken andthen determining how relevant that behaviour may be as a model for helping students tolisten effectively to a second language.

3. A successful listening strategy in L1

Extract 1 illustrates an occasion where speaker A is providing far too much informationfor her listener to cope with, even though they are both working in the same L1. We see theproblems for an intelligent Scottish undergraduate, B, coping with dense spoken input.Two students are working on a map task, a task designed to investigate circumstances

12 G. Brown / System 36 (2008) 10–21

which give rise to listening problems. The relevant issue here is the mismatch of informa-tion supplied to the two participants. Speaker A has a well-specified, up-to-date map witha route marked on it, and is telling B, who has been warned beforehand that the map shehas been given is sometimes incorrect or inadequate, how to draw the route (cf. Brown,1995). There is a low screen between the two participants so they can see each other’s facesbut not each other’s maps. B’s problems are:

(a) that her view of her map is not structured by the presence of a route marked on it;(b) that her less informative map is frequently incompatible with A’s, (there is no

‘bridge’ marked on B’s map and her ‘woods’ are far away from her current positionon the map whereas on A’s map the woods are quite close to the current position),which means B sometimes has processing problems working out what A could pos-sibly mean;

(c) that A, who has the correct picture in front of her so the next move looks verystraightforward, often packs far too much information in a single turn of speakingfor B to process. Here are just a few lines extracted from this lengthy exchange. Dotsindicate words that are omitted and + indicates a brief pause; each pair of instruc-tions and responses is numbered.

Extract 11A. and you go + round towards the wood + but you cut off between the top of the river and the woods

(. . .)1B. I go up to the top of the river + right2A. you go across the bridge right + up towards the wood + then go between the two rivers right + (. . .)

and the river with the bridge on it + between that and then up towards the castle2B. say that again Karen3A. right you go across the bridge + and you go up towards a wood3B. wait a minute where’s your bridge + I’ve not got a bridge (. . . here follow several exchanges explaining

where the bridge should be)4A. then you go towards the wood + but + then you go between the two rivers. . .4B. wait a minute what did you say about woods (Brown, 1995)

Notice how B selects for attention just one feature at a time from those mentioned by A,usually one which she can already see on her own map, quite close to her current posi-tion. Thus, in 1A, A mentions ‘the wood, the top of the river, the woods’, but B only paysattention to ‘the top of the river’ which she sees on her map. In 2A, A mentions ‘the

bridge, the wood, the two rivers, the river with the bridge, the castle’ and B asks for a re-peat – presumably there is just too much information to take in. In 3A, A mentions ‘the

bridge, a wood’ and in 3B, B pays attention to ‘your bridge’. After the issue of the bridge,which is not marked on B’s map, has been sorted out, A mentions in 4A ‘the wood, the

two rivers’ and B, who has now heard the expression ‘wood/woods’ five times, at last lis-tens to it and pays attention to it. B’s attention is focused upon the point she has got toin the task she is doing and upon the information present in the immediately surroundingarea on her map; she prefers information which she believes she shares with A andignores information that she cannot see is relevant to her current move (Brown, 1995,1997).

G. Brown / System 36 (2008) 10–21 13

We see here a competent L1 listener using a successful strategy of selective listening, ofignoring anything which does not have obvious relevance to her current move, a strategythat works well in a genre which involves following a series of instructions, where eachinstruction is independent of its neighbours. It seems that this type of information gapexercise (which can be made simpler or more complex by varying the number of incom-patible features on the two maps) provides L2 learners with experience of successful lis-tening if they are helped to focus attention on the requirements of a simple task andlisten only for those phrases which relate to their current move, ignoring everything elsethat is said.

4. Preferred rapid reading strategies in L1

Are there other, more general, strategies which are used when subjects are coping withcomplex input? Early work in this area concerned processing visually presented languagerather than spoken language. I shall begin with this, since there is reason to believe, as Ishall show, that the findings are relevant to spoken language as well. In a 1978 paper Jac-ques Mehler and associates reported an experiment working with French undergraduateswho would normally be expected to process efficiently in their L1. Each word in a Frenchsentence was flashed up on a screen, one at a time, using a technique known as rapidsequential visual processing (RSVP). After the last word of each sentence, subjects wereasked to write down the complete sentence. The experimenters gradually increased thespeed of presentation to a level where subjects could no longer fully process every wordin the sentence. The question of interest was: what did subjects select for attention in theirwritten versions under these stressful rapid conditions and what did they fail to register?Mehler et al. report ‘a selective failure to report the adjective, irrespective of whether itis preceded or followed by a noun and of whether it has appeared in a compound nounor noun phrase’ (1978, p. 8). This experiment replicated earlier results for English (Forster,1970; Holmes and Forster, 1972) where, again, under rapid presentation, nouns werereported but not adjectives, and verbs were reported but not adverbs. The message fromthese findings for L2 learners seems to be: if you are processing language under stress, asL2 listeners are typically doing, focus on nouns (and verbs), the key words from which youcan probably reconstitute the crucial aspects of the message.

The form of the experiment cannot tell us whether what is at issue for the L1 subjectshere is perception or memory – are the adjectives somehow not perceived or is it, whichseems to me more likely, that people are primed to search for nouns and that a partiallyperceived noun is privileged in memory above a partially perceived adjective of the samelength and general physical outline?

The issues raised by these experiments have implications for L2 listeners and for lessacademically able L1 listeners; members of both groups often report having been toldsomething too fast and having found it difficult to understand. Do they use the same strat-egies as these successful undergraduate subjects when they are processing language understress? Would the same type of result emerge from written texts which are longer than asentence and presented at a comfortable reading speed – i.e. would nouns still be privilegedin memory? If the answer is ‘yes’, would such results generalize to spoken language? Arethere features of language other than adjectives and adverbs which tend to be ignored bylisteners listening to spoken language under stressful conditions? I report here work rele-vant to these questions which, together with numerous associates, I have developed over

14 G. Brown / System 36 (2008) 10–21

the past 20 or more years, working with students in their own L1. How far would theseresults generalize to L2 students? This seems an area ripe for research.

5. Would similar results emerge from longer written texts?

I begin by discussing some work on processing extended written texts where writteninput is compared with spoken output. This work was undertaken as a spin-off from datacollected by my colleague John Williams. It is based on 24 subjects (14–16 year old nativespeakers of English), told that they would be asked questions about a 500-word Englishtext, divided into five paragraphs, which they read, self-paced, on a computer screen. Eachsubject read the narrative and then spent 3 min talking to an experimenter who asked aseries of predetermined questions. The subject was then asked to retell the story and theretelling was tape-recorded. The same procedure was repeated with a second 500-wordstory, to ensure that any results from the first story were not due simply to that story’sparticular structure. In the event, the outcome was almost identical for the two texts, soI report the joint outcomes. The data derives from analyzing the 24 retold versions of eachof the two stories, yielding 48 retellings.

The issue here is not whether all the words in the text are available for perception –depending on the reader’s strategy in reading, they are. The issue is, rather, whether ornot nouns are privileged in memory – a question addressed by asking for a retelling ofthe story. The content of an unprompted retelling is obviously somewhat hit-and-miss;each subject may remember far more than appears in the retelling. On the other hand,the retelling must represent part of what the subject does remember, presumably thoseparts which are most salient in memory. I examined how the retellings related to the ori-ginal texts in terms of the distribution of nouns, verbs, and adjectives/adverbs (treatedtogether as ‘adjuncts’ for the purposes of this exercise).

In the analysis presented here, I ignored variability in morphology, e.g. whether a pastor present tense was used, or whether a singular or plural form was used, and focusedexclusively on lexis, counting only lexical expressions. Many retellings contained a consid-erable number of more-or-less specific pronouns or non-lexical verbs like ‘do’ or ‘get’where the forms used were appropriate in the context – but my interest here did not liein whether or not the speaker remembered the reference correctly but in whether or notthe speaker reproduced the precise form used in the original text or a lexical equivalent.So the totals for both nouns and verbs are lower than they would have been if I hadnot insisted on matching lexis with lexis. The structure of the stories offered a series ofsemantic frames which enabled me to determine whether or not the speaker producedthe very same lexis in the same context as that used in the original text. When the samelexis is used in the same frame I call this ‘verbatim’ and when a different word is used,if it is plausibly similar in meaning, I call this ‘paraphrase’.

The outcome of this analysis, for both texts combined, is shown in Table 1. The lefthand column under ‘no.’ shows the total number of forms of the relevant type occurringin the two original texts. There were 149 lexical nouns in the texts, of which an average of52% occurred recognisably in the retellings, 42% verbatim and 10% paraphrased. Therewere 111 lexical verbs in the two texts, of which an average of 46% occur in the retellingsbut significantly fewer of these are verbatim (only 27%). Of the 104 original adjunct(adjective/adverb) expressions, significantly fewer than either Ns or Vs recur in the retel-lings (only 30%) but if they do occur they are relatively more likely to recur verbatim.

Table 1Analysis of lexis (Brown, 1994)

No. Verbatim (%) Paraphrase (%) Total (%)

Ns 149 42 10 52Vs 111 27 19 46As 104 23 7 30

G. Brown / System 36 (2008) 10–21 15

(The detailed statistics licensing the use of the term ‘significant’ are presented in Brown(1994).)

Note that nouns (Ns) recur only marginally more frequently than verbs (Vs) but are sig-nificantly more likely to be retold verbatim, whereas a much higher proportion of verbs isparaphrased. Adjuncts (adjectives and adverbs – (As)) are significantly less likely to occurin the retellings, which accords with Mehler et al.’s (1978) results; but, if they do occur,they are more likely to occur verbatim than verbs are.

Why are verbs so relatively volatile in recall? It is well known that there are many fewerverbs than nouns in English – in a 78,000-word college dictionary over 65% of entries arenouns and about 11% are verbs – the proportion of nouns grows as the size of the dictio-nary grows. (I am indebted to the lexicographer Michael Rundle, formerly of Longman,for this information.) However, many verb entries are polysemous, with a wide range ofpossible meanings (as in go, set), whereas most noun entries are monosemous with a singlemain meaning. So, typically, verbs are relatively flexible in that they can accommodate amuch wider range of use than nouns. Compare the verbs which I have capitalised inextracts 2 and 3 below: extract 2 is from paragraph 1 in the original written text, extract3 is the relevant part of one subject’s retold version:

Extract 2 (original text – para 1)He BUILT himself a workshop . . .his wife THOUGHT that he was probably MAKING a Christmas pres-ent for their two-year-old son. . ..None of his family SUSPECTED that he was a criminal. . .he was reallyPACKING firebombs into briefcases

Extract 3 (as retold by subject CS)they SUSPECTED it might have been because he was BUILDING a present for his two-year-old son . . .he was actually a criminal . . . MAKING firebombs –PLANTING them into briefcases (Brown, 1994)

Note that the sources of CS’s verbal paraphrases: ‘suspected/building/making’ all occur inthe original paragraph but in different semantic frames (and ‘planting’ occurs in the con-text of ‘planting briefcases in buildings’ in paragraph 4 of the original text). All theseverbs appear to have been activated in the speaker’s mind by appearing in the originaltext but in the retelling they are used in a different context. Nonetheless they make rea-sonable sense in the way that CS uses them, so I count these as paraphrases, not as ver-batim, in these contexts. The findings here suggest that verbs do not, in general, yieldsecure anchors for particular semantic frames in extended texts because it is the contextestablished by the nouns which selects a specific meaning from among the possible verbmeanings. Put simply, it is nouns that fix the particular meaning of verbs in a givensemantic frame, so it is nouns that are more likely to recur verbatim in the retellingsand to provide relatively secure semantic frames. This suggests to me that L2 listenersshould be encouraged in the early stages of learning to pay particular attention to nounsin listening (and in reading).

Table 2The discoursal function of nouns (Brown, 1994)

No. Verbatim (%) Paraphrase (%) Total (%)

ANs 65 56 10 66PPNs 84 31 10 41

16 G. Brown / System 36 (2008) 10–21

A further relevant point arising from this written material concerns the importance ofthe discoursal function in determining which nouns are recalled verbatim – this is relevantto some spoken language data which I mention later. If you separate out those nounswhich are arguments of the verb (that is, they form either the subject or the object ofthe verb, and are here labelled (ANs)) from nouns occurring in prepositional phrases(PPNs), you find an interesting difference in the likelihood of their occurring verbatim,or of occurring at all, in a retelling, as shown in Table 2.

Note that those nouns which are arguments of the verb and constitute the semanticframe of the clause (ANs) are significantly more likely a) to occur in the retelling andb) to occur verbatim proportionately more than the nouns in prepositional phrases(PPNs). The PP nouns are treated more like verbal or adjunct phrases than the argumentnouns. It is the argument nouns, those which play the crucial roles of subject or object in asentence, which are particularly privileged in recall, hence in memory, a finding which isconsistent with the work of Mehler et al. (1978) cited earlier. Again, this finding suggestsa strategy which would be helpful to L2 listeners – try to identify the argument nouns.

6. Would similar results occur in spoken language processing?

So far we have seen that in processing written language there appears to be a preferencefor identifying and remembering argument nouns over PP nouns, verbs, and adjuncts. Dowe find similar outcomes in processing spoken language? The work summarized below wasundertaken with 14–16 year old subjects, all native English speakers, in schools in Edin-burgh, Essex and Cambridge. In all cases, the subjects were identified by their schoolsas being either in the top third or the bottom third of the academic ability range as judgedby their examination and test results during their school careers. In a series of differenttask types over the years, I, together with various colleagues, had noted that there seemedto be some types of information which subjects, particularly those in the lower abilitygroups, tended to ignore. For instance in the map task, which altogether over 500 14–16 year-olds completed in one version or another, some aspects of instructions were fre-quently ignored. In this task, the A speaker, with the fully specified and correct map,instructed the B speaker, who had the less well-specified map how to draw a route acrossthe map. One example of a mismatch between the two maps might be where A’s map hastwo footpaths marked, one above and one below the church, and A tells B to go along thefootpath ‘above the church’ (note that this is a prepositional phrase of the sort which wesaw in the retellings from written input was less likely to be retained in the retelling). B’smap only shows the footpath below the church. Listeners from the academically more suc-cessful group typically queried the instruction. Up to 50% of subjects from the lower aca-demic group appeared to ignore the information in the prepositional phrase, ‘above thechurch’, and simply drew the route without any query along the footpath below thechurch.

G. Brown / System 36 (2008) 10–21 17

While I was at the University of Essex, working with Barry Smith and Peter Wright, weundertook two small studies working with 76 subjects altogether. First, we tested the abil-ity of subjects to use spatial information like ‘above/below’ phrases in straightforwardcontexts where the B map’s information was identical to that of the A map. The outcomeof this study showed that all subjects, in both higher and lower academic ability groups,correctly interpreted the information in prepositional expressions when they were notput under the stress of coping with incompatible information.

We now proceeded to explore what happens when subjects are under processing stressbecause of incompatible information. The next study involved recording what pairs of stu-dents, sitting side-by-side and cooperating on the task, said to each other as they listenedto recorded instructions for feeding animals in a zoo with a clearly marked plan of the zooin front of them. Once again there were built-in mismatches between what was on the planof the zoo and the instructions that pairs of subjects, working together, heard on tape.Subjects in the upper ability group typically commented on discrepant information,whereas subjects in the lower group were much less likely to comment when the adjunctlinguistic expression did not exactly match their context. They systematically preferredto ignore the adjunct information in expressions like ‘now feed the leopards beside thefood store’ when there were cheetahs, not leopards, beside the food store. Even if theywere currently close to the food store they would make a long detour off to feed the leop-ards, ignoring the conflicting information about where the leopards were located – againbehaving in the way that Mehler et al.’s work and the study we had done on retellingswould predict for subjects under stress in processing a message. They appeared to assumethat information in the noun phrase argument expression must be the crucial information.In contrast, subjects in the upper ability group would typically remark that the person giv-ing the instructions had probably confused leopards and cheetahs because they lookedsuperficially similar (Brown, 1990). Members of the upper ability sets appeared capableof understanding the broader context within which the utterance occurred rather than sim-ply fixating on the nouns (Brown, 2006).

Again, these findings seem to have relevance for constructing an L2 listening syllabus.At an early stage in listening to the L2, students should be provided with exercises whichencourage them to identify and remember the nouns which are subject or object of theverb. Only when students feel secure in doing this, should additional nouns which occurin prepositional phrases be added. And later still, once students are very secure in identi-fying nouns and the relationships between them as expressed in a verb phrase, they mightmove on to paying attention to the detail of prepositional phrases in a complexenvironment.

7. Paying attention to modal expressions

In a study undertaken with Stephanie Markman (Brown and Markman, 1991), we onceagain explored adjunct spatial expressions but this time added expressions indicatinguncertainty – modal expressions like ‘perhaps’, ‘possibly’, ‘might have’ and ‘could have’– since we had noted in earlier studies that some listeners appeared to ignore such quali-fiers, and interpreted utterances as factual where they were intended merely as indicatingpossibility.

The rather complex task we used for this was ‘the ogre’s castle task’ with a modifiedCluedo board providing the layout of an ogre’s castle and four distinct characters, each

18 G. Brown / System 36 (2008) 10–21

represented by a plastic figure (e.g. ‘a female fighter’, ‘a troll’ etc.) which could be movedaround the board. Pairs of subjects listened to a tape of each character giving their ownnarrative of the events leading up to the ogre’s murder. In order to stress the likelihoodof encountering utterances which were speculative rather than factual, subjects werewarned beforehand that one speaker was the murderer and might not tell the truth andthat all the action took place in darkness or flickering candlelight so that speakers mightnot be sure of what they had seen. A pair of students would listen to the recorded narrativeof one character, moving the plastic character around the board as the character moved,after which they would, between them, retell their own reconstituted version to a secondpair who had not heard the original recording, again using the plastic character as a prop.We recorded both the first pair’s retelling (usually interspersed with discussion betweenthem), and then the discussion that developed within the quartet.

We initially worked with pairs and quartets because a single individual might notremember all the detail of what had been said on tape, whereas two people workingtogether had a chance of reminding each other of something that one of them had forgot-ten. But it turned out that the discussion between the participants as they reconstructed theinput proved very illuminating. Once again, but this time in a narrative context, it wasclear that some subjects, in the lower academic ability group in particular, had problemscoping with incompatible information where argument nouns and location expressions didnot agree; once again they usually preferred to ignore the information contained in prep-ositional location phrases, as we had found in previous studies.

Where this study broke new ground was in showing that some subjects, particularlythose in the lower academic ability group, also had problems with modal expressions asin ‘there could have been someone hiding behind the door’ and reported them simply as fac-tually the case up to 80% of the time. The processing problem is obvious: forms such asperhaps, possibly, could have been, might have been seem to invite the listener to constructtwo possible mental models: first, where X is the case, and, second, where X is not the case.When there is pressure of complex information such as this, a simple (though risky) strat-egy might seem to be to avoid lumbering oneself with having to carry two possibilities inmind and to plump for either a positive or a negative interpretation. We saw, when quar-tets had heard all four versions and were trying to work out which of the four narratorsmust be the murderer, that those students who did not pay attention to the modal formalways assumed a positive interpretation – that X WAS the case. It was then frequentlyvery difficult for those subjects to cope with reorganizing their understanding, hence ofmodifying their own mental discourse representation, when they heard what other mem-bers of the quartet reported. Once having fixed their own interpretation, they were usuallyprepared to challenge the interpretation made by others in the group, so there was no issueof ‘listener blaming’, of blaming themselves for a misunderstanding (of the sort identifiedwith young children by Robinson (1981), and with 14–16 year-olds and undergraduates byBrown et al. (1987)). On the contrary, once a subject has established an interpretation, sheis normally most reluctant to abandon it, as Wason demonstrated with a range of subjectsincluding undergraduates (Wason, 1983; Wason and Johnson-Laird, 1972; Johnson-Lairdand Wason, 1977). [For similar results from L2 listeners, see Field, this volume.]

If it was pointed out to listeners who apparently ignored the implications of a modalexpression that a speaker had used a modal form, they usually did not deny this – oftenthey appear to have heard the form correctly in the first place but not to have paid atten-tion to its implications, either at the time or when it was repeated to them (Brown 1990). It

G. Brown / System 36 (2008) 10–21 19

may be that they typically understand modal marking as nothing to do with the truth of anutterance (i.e. as marking the speaker’s estimate of the truth value of a statement) but sim-ply as a marker of social politeness of the sort one encounters in a certain type of moda-lised standard English usage in such requests as I wonder if I could possibly ask you if you

could give me a lift home, where of course epistemic marking (marking the speaker’s esti-mation of the truth of a statement) is not at issue, since what is actually at issue here is arequest, not a statement of fact.

In a final brief pilot study, we found that it was possible to improve the performance ofthe less successful subjects in complex information states, if the implications of using amodal form in statements were carefully explained to them with copious illustrations,and if they were asked beforehand to pay careful attention to the language used andexplicitly warned to listen for particular forms and to take them into account in their inter-pretation. We began by spelling out the two possible scenarios which are introduced bymodal expressions such as may, might, can, could, perhaps, possibly etc. and working withthe students to envisage what the different scenarios would then imply. In doing this train-ing, we found it helpful to use tapes which, for example, emphasised modal expressions orcrucial adjunct expressions by marking them with heavy stress and extended intonation,thus explicitly drawing attention to them. The improvement in their performance suggeststhat a similar approach may be helpful for L2 students who find it difficult to cope withmaintaining two conflicting mental models of a particular state of affairs when they arealready struggling to interpret a message in a complex context.

8. Implications for teaching

We have now noted in both written (French and English) and spoken language, in twogenre types (instruction and narrative, Smith, 2003) and in different task types (sometimeswith taped speech, sometimes with spontaneous speech as input) a tendency among nativespeakers to process language selectively as soon as the reader or listener is put under someform of information pressure. It seems clear that some individuals experience such pres-sure more readily than others – or, to put it differently, some people seem to reach the limitof their processing capacity at an earlier point than others. We saw that selective process-ing, focusing on nouns, may contribute to successful outcomes where the listener at leastsecures the information necessary in the immediate context, as in the case of speaker B inextract 1. Similarly, it seems plausible that the readers in Mehler et al.’s sentence-basedexperiment, just like the readers of the 500-word narratives whose retellings we studied,secured the information essential to the tasks they were asked to complete by relying heav-ily on identifying and remembering the form of nouns, particularly those which were argu-ments of the verb. So selective listening (or reading) based on identifying nouns may be avery efficient processing strategy in many contexts and is clearly a good basic strategy instraightforward contexts.

This is presumably equally true for second language learners. If second language learnersare indeed trying to use their basic L1 strategy which gives priority to identifying nouns,then it would seem obvious that second language teachers should focus initially on helpingthem to achieve this. Given that nouns are stressed in the stream of speech and that mostnouns are preceded by unstressed ‘the’ (or, less frequently, ‘a’, ‘this’, ‘that’, etc.) it might behelpful initially to focus on identifying such markers in the stream of speech, noting that atleast one syllable of any noun will always be stressed. Early exercises might consist of

20 G. Brown / System 36 (2008) 10–21

listening for nouns in simple familiar contexts with pairs or triplets of students workingtogether, listening to a paused tape, and helping each other identify the nouns so thatthe activity is treated as a game rather than as a test. In an instructional context, studentsmight be given a list of L1 words, and asked to listen to a tape in the L2 and work out theequivalent L2 words: for example, in instructions for filling in a form, they might have toidentify name (first name/family name) – address –date of birth – signature – date, anddescribing a form – top – bottom – left-hand side – right-hand side – space – capital letters

– numbers. In a narrative fairy-tale context, students might hear a taped story and listenfor nouns such as the L2 equivalents of princess – witch – curse – tower – prison – lock – door

– prince/knight – ladder – window – escape(noun), and then attempt to reconstitute the storyfrom the nouns (using L1 forms as well). Similarly, in a ‘cops and robbers’ drama, studentscould again listen for nouns occurring on the L2 tape such as man – thief – house – back door

– window – break-in – darkness - police – whistle – car – arrest and, having between themidentified most or all of the nouns, they could once again try to reconstitute the story aswell as they can, before listening for a second time to the original L2 tape and seeinghow much they got right. As they progress in this type of exercise, the list of L1 equivalentsof the nouns they will hear on the L2 tape should be gradually reduced. These basic ‘fivefinger exercises’ should take no more than 10–15 min in any one listening session.

Once students are comfortable with the idea of listening for the basic ‘key words’ of anutterance, the argument nouns, they can progress to listening specifically for verbs, treatedin the same manner as I suggested for nouns. Then they could move on to prepositionalnoun phrases and adjectives/adverbs. Ideally, they would not encounter more complexinformational structures, particularly as used by disfluent speakers, until they can copecomfortably with identifying the basic key words. So far, their listening would seem to rep-licate the experience of young children acquiring their first language. However, at somepoint students must learn that speakers under pressure may produce messages whereone part is incompatible with the information encoded in the argument nouns and theyshould be helped to appreciate that they cannot always rely exclusively on nouns whileignoring crucial information in an adjunct phrase or a modal expression. At such a point,the basic strategy needs to be supplemented with fuller processing and students whoseeveryday listening relies heavily on the basic strategy alone, in a first or a second language,may benefit from structured intervention from their teachers.

The issue of teaching the understanding of modal expressions raises a number of issues. Ihave suggested that less academically able students working in their L1 appear not to appre-ciate that the modal expression modifies or queries the truth of a statement. For any L2 lear-ner who manifests similar problems in coping with modals in the L2, it would be relevant toknow how epistemic modality is marked in the student’s L1 and whether or not the studentrecognises the force of such modality in the L1. Students with problems in this area seemlikely to need the sort of explicit training that I described at the end of Section 7.

Selective language processing is an area we know remarkably little about, in reading orin listening, but it raises a range of questions which are potentially highly relevant to thoseconcerned with listening comprehension and the education of second language learners.

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