Examine your discriminative listening skills according to each of the five skills. Please give examples and note your strengths and weaknesses. Clearly identify each skill and number your responses (1-5).

Skills Involved in Discriminative Listening

Auditory Skills

You develop, refine, acquire, and cultivate your auditory discrimination skills throughout your life (and even during our prenatal stage, according to some specialists). Your ability to discriminate sounds is primarily based on your previous experiences as well as how familiar you are with the various sounds that you are exposed to (Brownell, 2002). Discriminative listening skills generally improve as you get older, but efforts should be made to improve your proficiency. "Your ability to localize a sound source is a critical aspect of this process since it permits certain sounds to be attended to in the presence of other competing sounds" (Brownell, 2002, p. 81). The following five discriminative skills are important to develop in order to improve your listening:

1. Refining your skills according to the Weaver/Rutherford hierarchy

Researchers Susan Weaver and William Rutherford (1974) developed a hierarchy of auditory skills presented in a developmental order. The order progresses from prenatal, infancy, preschool, kindergarten - grade 3, and grade 4-6. The auditory skills include both environment and discrimination skills.

Some examples of environment skills include:

• fetal movement in response to noise
• responding to loud noises by crying
• recognizing that people and objects make sounds
• connecting of a sound with an object
• identifying animals and individuals by sounds
• learning that sounds differ in pattern, pitch intensity, and duration
• recognizing sounds in the environment at specific times of the day and judging them for orientation and mobility
• starting to parrot speech sounds
• responding to one's name
• distinguishing specific sounds from background noise
• understanding that sounds vary in intensity, pitch, pattern, and duration
• recognizing accented words within a statement
• recognizing long and short vowel sounds
• recognizing rhyming words

1. Recognizing the sound structure (phonology) of our language

Phonological rules dictate how sounds are combined to form words. They refer to the organization of sounds into individual languages. Phonology explains why words such as champagne and occasion are spelled exactly the same in English and French, but are pronounced differently (Adler & Towne, 1999).

1. Detecting and isolating vocal cues, including vocal qualities, vocal characterizers, vocal qualifiers, and vocal segregates

Vocal qualities refer to all the characteristics of speech not directly related to spoken words, such as pitch, rhythm, loudness, intensity, articulation, pronunciation, tempo, and inflection (Remland, 2004; Trenholm & Jensen, 2004). Vocal characterizers are the noises we make that are not tied to speech, such as burping, laughing, crying, sneezing, whining, and moaning. Vocal segregates are the sounds that obstruct speech fluency. Annoying pauses or speech fillers such as uh or um are examples of vocal segregates. The combination of these vocal cues creates an original vocal pattern for each of us.

1. Understanding dialectal and accentual differences

Dialectal and accentual differences impact your perception of others. For example, French accents are often perceived as being sophisticated while English accents are viewed as intelligent. We need to be more aware of the judgments we make based on a person's accent or dialect. We will examine dialectal and accentual differences in greater detail later in this module.

1. Recognizing environmental sounds

The ability to identify environmental sounds can improve your listening abilities. The mother who can distinguish between the cry of her child and several other toddlers from the next room is utilizing her discriminative listening abilities. The mechanic who can immediately diagnose a problem by simply listening to a car engine also has a unique ability to recognize environmental sounds. As you work to be more sensitive to the sounds of your environment you will increase your accuracy in recognizing sounds (Wolvin & Coakley, 1996).

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1 Refining skills according to the WeaverRutherford hierarchy Example As an infant I responded to loud noises by crying indicating my basic auditory environment skills As I grew older into preschool a... View the full answer