An insight into listeners' problems: too much bottom-up or too much top-down? [An article from: System]

This digital document is a journal article from System, published by Elsevier in 2004. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
Difficulty in the early stages of second language listening is sometimes said to derive from too heavy a reliance upon bottom-up information. Less experienced listeners supposedly focus so much attention upon identifying sounds and words that they have no time or mental capacity left for building higher-level units of meaning. However, there is contrary evidence which indicates that non-native listeners make considerable use of top-down processes. This paper suggests that listening to a foreign language may be assisted by an interactive-compensatory mechanism already available in L1, which compensates for gaps in understanding. Two major questions are then raised: If top-down and bottom-up information are in apparent conflict, which one prevails? And how do learners deal with new items of vocabulary when they crop up in a listening passage? Three experiments attempted to find answers.