Listening Comprehension: the effects of sex, age, passage structure and speech rate

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Abstract
Groups of 7‐, 10‐, 12‐ and 15‐year‐old children listened to a prose passage delivered at either a slow or a fast speech rate, and structured either with related pieces of information adjacently positioned or separated by several other sentences. All children received a recall test immediately after listening to the passage. The main findings were that: (1) recall was best for both boys and girls following slow presentation of the passage structured with the related sentences adjacently positioned; (2) at all ages the girls were superior to the boys on the passage arranged with the related details separated, when the speech rate was slow, but they were inferior at the fast rate; (3) while speech rate produced a large difference in recall for young and old children, at ten or twelve years there was only a slight difference, suggesting that above this age the analysis strategy used by the children changed; (4) girls were more greatly affected by speech rate at 15 years than at any other age. The findings were discussed in terms of their application to the practical learning situation.

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