Handbook of Listening C 9781119554141, 9781119554172, 9781119554165, 1391631811, 3994094194, 1119554144

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The Handbook of Listening

Handbooks in Communication and Media This series provides theoretically ambitious but accessible volumes devoted to the major fields and subfields within communication and media studies. Each volume provides experienced scholars and teachers with a convenient and comprehensive overview of the latest trends and critical directions, while grounding and orientating students with a broad range of specially commissioned chapters. The Handbook of Children, Media, and Development, edited by Sandra L. Calvert and Barbara J. Wilson The Handbook of Crisis Communication, edited by W. Timothy Coombs and Sherry J. Holladay The Handbook of Internet Studies, edited by Mia Consalvo and Charles Ess The Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address, edited by Shawn J. Parry‐Giles and J. Michael Hogan The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication, edited by Thomas K. Nakayama and Rona Tamiko Halualani The Handbook of Global Communication and Media Ethics, edited by Robert S. Fortner and P. Mark Fackler The Handbook of Communication and Corporate Social Responsibility, edited by Øyvind Ihlen, Jennifer Bartlett, and Steve May The Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Media, edited by Karen Ross The Handbook of Global Health Communication, edited by Rafael Obregon and Silvio Waisbord The Handbook of Global Media Research, edited by Ingrid Volkmer The Handbook of Global Online Journalism, edited by Eugenia Siapera and Andreas Veglis The Handbook of Communication and Corporate Reputation, edited by Craig E. Carroll The Handbook of Media and Mass Communication Theory, edited by Robert S. Fortner and P. Mark Fackler The Handbook of International Advertising Research, edited by Hong Cheng The Handbook of Psychology of Communication Technology, edited by S. Shyam Sundar The Handbook of International Crisis Communication Research, edited by Andreas Schwarz, Matthew W. Seeger, and Claudia Auer The Handbook of Organizational Rhetoric and Communication, edited by Øyvind Ihlen and Robert L. Heath The Handbook of European Communication History, edited by Klaus Arnold, Paschal Preston, and Susanne Kinnebrock The Handbook of Listening, edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie

The Handbook of Listening

Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie

This edition first published 2020 © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions. The right of Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with law. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA Editorial Office 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print‐on‐demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data Names: Worthington, Debra L., editor. | Bodie, Graham, editor. Title: The handbook of listening / edited by Debra L. Worthington, Graham   D. Bodie. Description: Hoboken, NJ, USA : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2020. | Series:   Handbooks in communication and media | Includes bibliographical   references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020016323 (print) | LCCN 2020016324 (ebook) | ISBN   9781119554141 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119554172 (adobe pdf) | ISBN   9781119554165 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Listening. Classification: LCC BF323.L5 H35 2020 (print) | LCC BF323.L5 (ebook) |   DDC 302.2/242–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016323 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016324 Cover Design: Wiley Cover Image: © Ensuper/Shutterstock Set in 10/12pt Galliard by SPi Global, Pondicherry, India

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Contents

About the Editors ix About the Authors xi Acknowledgmentsxxi Introduction1 Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie Part I  Methodological Approaches

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1. Physiological Approaches Susan Teubner‐Rhodes and Stefanie E. Kuchinsky

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2. Phenomenological Approaches Lisbeth A. Lipari

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3. Interpretive Approaches Mohan J. Dutta and Phoebe Elers

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4. Empirical Approaches Andrea J. Vickery

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Part II  Disciplinary Foundations

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5. Architecture Karen Van Lengen

71

6. Audiology Annette Hurley and Meagan M. Walczak

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7. Interpersonal Communication Valerie Manusov

103

8. Language Learning Nicole Altvater‐Mackensen

121

vi Contents  9. Linguistics Vahid Aryadoust, Yuvadarshini Ilang Kumaran, and Stella Ferdinand

139

10. Management and Leadership Sarit Pery, Guy Doytch, and Avraham N. Kluger

163

11. Media Studies Kate Lacey

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12. Musicology Elvira Brattico and Niels Trusbak Haumann

199

13. Philosophy Deborah S. Mower

217

14. Psychology Margarete Imhof

233

15. Sound Studies Matt Brounley

253

Part III  Teaching Listening

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16. Instructional Design and Assessment Michael Rost

265

17. Teaching Listening in Classroom Settings Mary Lahman

279

18. Music Education Daniel C. Johnson

291

19. Training and Development Judi Brownell

303

20. Listening Education in the Medical Curriculum Helen Meldrum and Rebekah Apple

315

Part IV  Contexts and Applications

327

21. Mindful Interpersonal Listening Susanne M. Jones and Amy C. Joyer

329

22. Listening, Lying, and Deceit Timothy R. Levine

341

23. Mediated Listening Christopher D. Bond

353

24. Listening and Relational Lawyering Susan L. Brooks

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Contents

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25. Listening in Health Care Lisa McKenna, Ted Brown, Louise Oliaro, Brett Williams, and Angela Williams

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26. Listening for Healthy Democracy Jim Macnamara

385

Part V  Emerging Perspectives

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27. Performative Listening Chris McRae

399

28. Augmented Reality Mark Roman Miller and Jeremy N. Bailenson

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29. Building Peace Through Listening Zenebe Beyene

419

30. Silence Robin Patric Clair

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Epilogue: Moving Toward Listening Literacy Andrew D. Wolvin

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Index449

About the Editors

Graham D. Bodie (PhD, Purdue University) is Professor of Integrated Marketing Communication in the School of Journalism and New Media at The University of Mississippi. He is recognized as an international expert on listening and  the social cognitive underpinnings of human communicative behavior, having authored  over  90 published papers in outlets such as ­ Human  Communication Research, Communication Monographs, Communication Research, Communication Yearbook,  and the  International Journal of Listening, and edited one book, The Sourcebook of Listening Research: Methodologies and Measures (with Debra Worthington). His productivity has placed him in the top 1% of published Communication Studies scholars. In recognition of his scholarly efforts, Dr. Bodie  has received several  awards, including the  Janice  Hocker  Rushing Early Career Research Award from the  Southern States Communication Association, the Early Career Award given by the Interpersonal Communication Division of the National Communication Association, and the Research Award bestowed by the International Listening Association. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and US Department of Defense and he regularly appears  in local and national media outlets on issues relevant to listening in close relationships. Debra L. Worthington (PhD, University of Kansas) is Professor of Communication and Associate Director of the School of Communication and Journalism at Auburn University. She is a co‐author of Listening: Processes, Functions, and Competency (Taylor & Francis, 2018) (with Margaret Fitch‐Hauser). She co‐edited The Sourcebook of Listening Research: Methodology and Measures (Wiley, 2017) (with Graham Bodie), winner of the 2018 Distinguished Book Award from the Communication and Social Cognition of the National Communication Association. Her research has received multiple top paper, top convention, and top panel awards. Other recognitions include: the Ralph G. Nichols Listening Award, the Burton Award for Legal Achievement, and the ILA Researcher of the Year Award. Her research has been recognized by organizations such as the American Society of Trial Consultants, the European Communication Research and Education Association, and the International Listening Association, as well as by multiple divisions of the National Communication Association, the Eastern Communication Association, and the Southern Communication Association. In 2017, she was inducted into the International Listening Association’s Hall of Fame in recognition of her outstanding research, teaching, and service to the field of listening. She is a past president of the International Listening Association.

About the Authors

Nicole Altvater‐Mackensen (PhD, Radboud University Nijmegen) is Assistant Professor of Developmental Psychology at Johannes‐Gutenberg‐University Mainz. She conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Göttingen and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig. Her research focuses on mechanisms of early language development and investigates the neural underpinnings of speech perception and language learning in first and second language acquisition. Rebekah Apple (DHSc, A.T. Still University) is Director, Master of Medical Management in Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. She is responsible for direction and strategy refinement for a degree program exclusively for physicians. She has served as a health care advisor, educator, and ethicist for over 10 years in academic, clinical, and association environments. Prior to joining Heinz College, Rebekah served as Director of Programming and Student Affairs for the American Medical Student Association. Rebekah continues to consult with numerous hospitals and health systems, serves on three hospital ethics committees, and teaches ethics to third year University of Pittsburgh medical students. She holds a Masters in Bioethics from the University of South Florida and a doctorate in Health Science. Vahid Aryadoust (PhD, Nanyang Technological University [NTU]) is Assistant Professor in the National Institute of Education of NTU, Singapore. His areas of interest are listening assessment, eye tracking, neurocognition in language assessment, and Scientometrics. He has provided consultation to educational organizations around the world and has led language assessment projects funded by organizations such as Cambridge‐Michigan Language Assessment, British Council, Pearson Education, and Paragon testing Enterprises, and published his research in  Language Testing, Language Assessment Quarterly, Assessing Writing, Educational Assessment, Educational Psychology, and Computer Assisted Language Learning. His most recent edited volumes are entitled Quantitative data analysis for language assessment (Vol 1: Fundamental techniques; Vol 2: Advanced methods) (Routledge). Jeremy N. Bailenson (PhD, Northwestern University) is founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, Thomas More Storke Professor in the Department of Communication, Professor (by courtesy) of Education, Professor (by courtesy) Program in Symbolic Systems, and a Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment. He earned his PhD in Cognitive Psychology in 1999 and spent four years at the University of California, Santa Barbara as a Post‐Doctoral Fellow and Assistant Research Professor. Bailenson studies the psychology of Virtual and Augmented Reality, how virtual experiences lead to changes in

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perceptions of self and others. His most recent research focuses on how virtual experiences can transform education, environmental conservation, empathy, and health. He is the recipient of the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford. Zenebe Beyene (PhD, University of Nebraska, Lincoln) is Assistant Professor and Coordinator of International Programs in the School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi. He specializes in media in conflict and post‐conflict societies. He has taught, researched, or provided training in Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, and the US. Dr. Beyene has served as a consultant for InterNews Network, US Agency for International Development, United Nations Development Programme, Voice of America, Pennsylvania University/ Carnegie Foundation, Oxford University and Oxford University/UK Embassy in Ethiopia and Aadland Consult/IDEA International. Dr. Beyene has published or co‐published work about tolerance and online debate in Ethiopia; the role of TeleCourt in changing conceptions of justice and authority in Ethiopia; the role of ICT in peace‐building in Africa; media use and abuse in Ethiopia; and “From an Emperor to the Derg and Beyond: Examining the Intersection of Music and Politics in Ethiopia” as well as the “Role of the Diaspora in Nation Building and Peace Building.” Christopher D. Bond (PhD, University of Memphis) is Associate Professor of Communication and Journalism at Missouri Western State University. A past president of the International Listening Association, he has also previously served as a principal investigator of several state and federally funded research grants regarding environmental tobacco smoke and smoking policy. As director of the Clean Air Research and Policy Program and Chair of Clean Air St. Joseph, he was instrumental in assisting his city and university in implementing smoke‐free policies. He is currently serving as the Executive Editor of the Journal of Applied Learning in Higher Education and director of the conference on applied learning in higher education. His primary research interests examine listening among social media users, as well as cyber‐bullying and digital self‐harm. He is the author of the upcoming article: An analysis of humor and cyber‐ bullying messages within direct anonymous feedback apps. Elvira Brattico (PhD, University of Helsinki) holds a double position as full professor and executive board member at the Center of Excellence Music in the Brain (MIB), Aarhus University and The Royal Academy of Music Aarhus/Aalborg, Denmark, and as full professor of General Psychology in the Department of Education, Psychology, Communication, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy. She is also adjunct professor at the universities of Helsinki and Jyväskylä, Finland. After obtaining two master’s degrees in Music and Philosophy in Italy, she moved to the University of Helsinki, Finland, where she obtained a PhD in Psychology (2007). From 2009 to 2013, she was executive board member of the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Music Research. Currently, she is acknowledged as a leading author of music psychology and neuroscience with approximately 150 papers (over 100 peer‐reviewed). Susan L. Brooks (JD, New York University; MA, University of Chicago) is Associate Dean for Experiential Learning and Professor of Law at the Drexel University Kline School of Law in Philadelphia, PA, US. She teaches Family Law as well as innovative courses on holistic representation, professional formation, reflective practice, effective communication, and access to justice. Professor Brooks has written extensively and has conducted workshops to promote “Relational Lawyering,” a humanistic approach to legal education and practice integrating personal, interpersonal, and systemic dimensions, which includes habits of mind and practical tools to strengthen self‐awareness, cross‐cultural lawyering, and the potential for healing. Matt Brounley (BA, McGill University) is a PhD candidate focusing on popular music and sound studies in the Department of Music History and Theory at Stony Brook University. His dissertation, “That Sound in your Head: Guitar Tone and Entrepreneurial Values,” combines



About the Authors

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approaches from ethnomusicology, music theory, and sound studies to investigate how guitar sounds have been packaged, sold, and valued through the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries. Part of his dissertation draws from his career in musical instrument sales. Ted Brown (PhD, University of Queensland) is Associate Professor and Undergraduate Course Coordinator in the Department of Occupational Therapy, Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He has over 30 years’ experience as an occupational therapy clinician, educator, and researcher and has published over 280 peer‐reviewed journal manuscripts, 28 book chapters, and 2 edited books. Ted is Associate Editor of the Australian Occupational Therapy Journal and American Journal of Occupational Therapy. His research interests include occupational therapy services for children and families, applications of  Rasch  Measurement Model to paediatric assessments, evidence‐based education of health profession students, and professional journal  bibliometrics. Ted was made Fellow of the American Occupational Therapy Association in 2019 and Occupational Therapy Association Research Academy in 2017 for significant contributions to occupational therapy research, education and service. Judi Brownell (PhD, Syracuse University) is Professor Emeritus of Organizational Communication at the School of Hotel Administration, SC Johnson College of Business, Cornell University. Her executive and online programs in listening are taken worldwide. Her research focuses on listening as it supports service quality standards. She has authored six textbooks including Listening: Attitudes, Principles, & Skills (Routledge, 2018) and The Listening Advantage (Routledge, 2019), and published over 100 articles and book chapters. She has served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Dean of Students, and Director for Graduate Studies at the Hotel School and is a faculty fellow, Cornell Institute for Healthy Futures. A past president of the International Listening Association, she is the recipient of listening research awards, and an inductee of the International Listening Association’s Hall of Fame. Robin Patric Clair (PhD, Kent State University) is a University Fellow, Distinguished Alum, and Full Professor in the Brian Lamb School of Communication (BLSC) at Purdue University. Her research interests include the broad areas of ethnography, organizational communication, and rhetoric. More specifically, she studies silence from a narrative approach (e.g., sequestered stories), especially associated with marginalized members of society. She has six top paper awards, three best article of the year awards, two outstanding book of the year awards, and the Golden Anniversary award bestowed by the National Communication Association. Her book, Organizing Silence: A World of Possibilities (SUNY, 1998) won the Outstanding Book of the Year award from the Organizational Communication Division of NCA in 2000. Guy  Doytch (B.A., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel) received his undergraduate degree in Psychology and Political Science. During his studies, he received three Dean’s Yearly Excellence Certificates. Mohan J. Dutta (PhD, University of Minnesota) is Dean’s Chair Professor of Communication at Massey University in New Zealand, and Director of the Center for Culture‐Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE). CARE works to develop culturally‐centered, community‐based projects of social change, community advocacy, and activism that articulate health as a human right. Previously, Dutta served as the Provost’s Chair Professor and Head of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore, and as Professor and Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Education in the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University. He is the winner of the NCA Health Communication Division’s 2017 Outstanding Scholar Award and the International Communication Association’s 2015 Applied/Public Policy Communication Researcher Award. Phoebe Elers (PhD, Auckland University of Technology) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Center for Culture‐Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation at Massey University,

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About the Authors

New Zealand. She received her PhD from the School of Communication Studies at Auckland University of Technology in 2018. Her primary research interests include health communication, digital inequalities, critical and cultural studies, and Māori health. Stella Ferdinand is an undergraduate student of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Upon graduation, she will receive her Bachelors of Science (Honours) degree in Biological Sciences and Psychology. Her research interests include neuropsychology, behavioural, and translational neuroscience. Throughout her college and undergraduate years, she has participated in various research projects and has partnered with organizations such as Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) and Duke‐NUS Medical School. Niels Trusbak Haumann (PhD, Aarhus University) is a researcher in cognitive neuroscience of music and auditory perception. He holds a BA in musicology and psychology from Aarhus University and Aalborg University, MA in musicology from Aarhus University with specialization in interactions between rhythm, tonality, and emotion investigated with psychological experiments, and PhD in cognitive neuroscience from Aarhus University (2015) with specialization in brain adaptation to music of different cultures investigated with MEG and MRI experiments. Since 2016, he has published multiple international peer‐reviewed research and methods papers addressing objective neurophysiological measurements of auditory perception in normal hearing  –  in musicians and non‐musicians, in listeners with normal and depressive mood states, and in cochlear implant users with electric hearing – utilizing MIR, MEG, EEG, and MRI methods. Annette Hurley (PhD, Louisiana State University; CCC‐A) is serving as Department Head and Audiology Program Director in the Department of Communication Disorders at LSUHSC. As a tenured associate professor with over 25 years of experience, her duties include teaching, research, and providing clinical services. Her areas of research are electrophysiology and auditory processing disorders. Margarete Imhof (PhD, University of Bamberg) is Professor of Psychology in Education at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. Her primary research interest is in listening in educational contexts, such as instruction, teacher training, and classroom communication for all levels of education. She is an active member of the International Listening Association, and has served as editor of the International Journal of Listening since 2012. Daniel C. Johnson (PhD, The University of Arizona) is Professor of Music and Music Education at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. A Fulbright Scholar with 30  years of  PK‐university  teaching experience,  he  is an international authority on music education, focusing on classroom music instruction, music listening, and arts integration. A graduate of the New England Conservatory, he has published in numerous eminent journals, including The Journal of Research in Music Education and The Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education. His most recent book chapters appear in The Oxford Handbook of Assessment Policy and Practice in Music Education  and  Applying Model Cornerstone Assessments in K–12 Music. His forthcoming book is Musical Thinking: A Taxonomy and Framework (Routledge). Susanne M. Jones (PhD, Arizona State University, 2000) is a professor in the Department of Communication Studies, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Minneapolis, MN. Her research focuses on the influence of verbal and nonverbal supportive communication on emotion regulation and has appeared in Communication Monographs, Communication Research, and Human Communication Research, as well as in interdisciplinary journals, such as Mindfulness. She is an Associate Editor of Mindfulness, and her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation. Amy C. Joyer (MA, University of Minnesota, 2018) is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication Studies, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Minneapolis, MN. Her



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research focuses on children’s apologies, forgiveness, and reparative behavior, with special focus on the influences of attachment. She has presented her work at the National Communication Association conference. Avraham N. (Avi) Kluger (PhD, Stevens Institute of Technology) is Professor of Organizational Behavior at the School of Business Administration at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in Israel. He demonstrated (with Angelo  DeNisi) that feedback, even positive feedback, can be detrimental to performance. This research won the 1996 Outstanding Paper in Organizational Behavior by the Academy of Management, and the first William A. Owens Scholarly Achievement Award for the best publication (1996) by the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. His research on feedback sign (with Dina Van‐Dijk) received the 2009 Award for Best Competitive Paper by the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management. Since 2013, his research has centered on listening, and has been published in leading journals, including Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Stefanie E. Kuchinsky (PhD, University of Illinois) is a Research Investigator in the Audiology and Speech Pathology Center at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. She is also affiliated with the University of Maryland’s Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences and the Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security. She received her PhD in cognitive psychology. She then completed postdoctoral training in cognitive neuroscience in the Hearing Research Program at the Medical University of South Carolina. Using neuroimaging and pupillometry methods, she investigates the sensory and attention systems that support language understanding in adverse conditions. A primary goal of her work is to mitigate the speech‐recognition challenges faced by older adults with hearing loss through interventions that optimize both comprehension accuracy and cognitive effort. Yuvadarshini Ilang Kumaran (MSc, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) is a researcher at the Centre for Research and Development in Learning (CRADLE@NTU), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her research interests include science of learning, educational neuroscience, cognitive linguistics, and applications and utilities of various neuroimaging modalities such as EEG and fNIRS in these domains. Yuvadarshini received her Bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from Anna University in 2015 and her MSc in Biomedical Engineering in 2016. Kate Lacey (PhD, University of Liverpool) is Professor of Media History and Theory in the School of Media, Film, and Music at the University of Sussex. Her work focuses on radio history, mediated publics, and listening as political action. She  has published widely, including  Feminine Frequencies: Gender, German Radio and the Public Sphere, 1923–1945 (University of Michigan Press, 1996) and Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age (Polity, 2013). She was a founding member of the Radio Studies Network and sits on the editorial boards of The Radio Journal and The International Journal of Cultural Studies. Mary Lahman (PhD, Indiana University) is Professor of Communication Studies at Manchester University, and she published Awareness and Action: A Travel Companion, with the Institute of General Semantics in August 2018. Created as a practical guide for learning to communicate well, the book urges readers to answer the following core questions: “Are you aware of how your words create worlds?” and “Are you aware of how your language and listening habits impact interactions in the classroom, at work, and on the road?” A frequent collaborator in communication journals, she worked with departmental colleagues to complete a 2nd edition of Communication Across Contexts: A Listening‐centered Approach (Kendall Hunt, 2018). Lahman credits her mentors for winning the Sanford I. Berman Award for Excellence in Teaching General Semantics in 2014.

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Timothy R. Levine (PhD, Michigan State)  is Distinguished Professor and Chair of Communication Studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Levine’s teaching and research interests include deception, interpersonal communication, persuasion and social influence, experimental research design, measurement validation, and statistical conclusions validity. He has published more than 140 journal articles. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, and Department of Justice, and his work has received press coverage from New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, NBC, CNN, Discovery Channel, and  National Geographic.  He edited the two volume  Encyclopedia of Deception. His most recent book, Duped: Truth‐Default Theory and the Social Science of Lying and Deception (University of Alabama Press, 2019), details his 30‐year program of research on deception leading to the development and testing of Truth‐Default Theory. Lisbeth A. Lipari (PhD, Stanford University) is Professor in the Department of Communication at Denison University. With over 33 publications, Lipari continues her exploration in European phenomenology, philosophy of language, dialogic philosophy, ethics, and listening. Lipari refers to language philosophies in order to develop a theoretical lens on listening as a communicative praxis between ethico‐political spheres. Her recent book, Listening, Thinking, Being: Toward an Ethics of Attunement (Penn State University Press, 2014) received the top book award from NCA’s Ethics Division in 2015 and the top book award from NCA’s Philosophy of Communication Division in 2016. Jim Macnamara (PhD, Western Sydney University) is Distinguished Professor in the School of  Communication  at the University of Technology Sydney. He is also Visiting Professor at London School of Economics and Political Science, Media and Communications Department and the London College of Communication. He is internationally recognized for his research into evaluation of public communication and organizational listening. Jim is the author of 16 books  including  The 21st Century Media (R)evolution: Emergent Communication Practices (Peter Lang, New York,  2014);  Organizational Listening: The Missing Essential in Public Communication (Peter Lang, New York, 2016); and Evaluating Public Communication: Exploring New Models, Standards, and Best Practice (Routledge UK, 2018). Valerie Manusov (PhD, University of Southern California) is Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. She studies interpersonal communication and relationships broadly and nonverbal communication specifically. She is the editor of The  Sourcebook of Nonverbal Measures: Going Beyond Words  and a co‐editor on  The Sage Handbook of Nonverbal Communication and Attribution, Communication Behavior, and Close Relationships. Dr. Manusov has published over 75 articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia  entries. Her articles have been published in the  International Journal of Listening, Communication Monographs,  Human Communication Research,  Communication Research, and Research on Language and Social Interaction. She teaches courses in interpersonal communication, nonverbal communication, and research methods. She also helped to create the Nonverbal Communication division of the National Communication Association. Lisa McKenna (PhD, Deakin University) is Head of the School of Nursing and Midwifery, La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. Her professional background spans clinical practice, education, and research across the disciplines of nursing and midwifery. Lisa has extensive experience in the education of nurses, midwives and other health professionals. She has researched extensively in health professional education, in particular in the areas of professional attribute development, graduate preparation and transition to practice, and workforce development. Lisa has published over 190 international, peer‐reviewed articles, 9 book chapters, and 9 books. She is a Fellow of the Australian College of Nursing, Editor‐in‐Chief of Collegian: The Australian Journal of Nursing Practice, Scholarship and Research,  Editorial Advisor for  Nurse Education Today and regularly invited to speak nationally and internationally.



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Chris McRae (PhD, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale) is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida where he teaches courses in Performance Studies. He is the author of  Performative Listening: Hearing Others in Qualitative Research  and  co‐author of the book  Creating Performances for Teaching and Learning: A Practice Session for Pedagogy. Helen Meldrum (PhD, Clark University) received her doctorate in Psychology and Education. She holds a master’s in Counseling and Consulting Psychology from Harvard University. Her BS is from Emerson College, where she concentrated in Communication Education and Psychology. She is currently Associate Professor of Psychology at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Prior to joining the Bentley faculty, she was Associate Professor of Psychology and Communication at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. Helen has addressed a wide variety of groups across the country and internationally. Active as a consultant, her clients have included: Vanda Pharmaceuticals, Academy of Oncology Nurse & Patient Navigators Pharmaceutical Society of Australia, and Pfizer. Her most recent book is Characteristics of Compassion: Portraits of Exemplary Physicians (Jones & Bartlett, 2010). Mark Roman Miller (BS, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2016) is a PhD student in the Human‐Computer Interaction program at Stanford University. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Illinois and was the recipient of the 2016 C. W. Gear Outstanding Undergraduate Award. He studies social interaction in augmented reality, whether that is with real, remote, or artificial others. His most recent publication replicates the effect of social facilitation and inhibition using an augmented reality audience. He also develops computational methods to understand nonverbal behavior captured by virtual reality systems. Deborah S. Mower (PhD, University of Wisconsin‐Madison) is the Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Hume Bryant Associate Professor of Ethics and Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Mississippi. She specializes in moral psychology, applied ethics and public policy, and moral education.  She is currently a Board Member for PLATO  (Philosophy Learning and  Teaching Organization)  and is the recent past President of  SEAC (Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum). She published two co‐edited volumes  –  Civility in Politics and Education (Routledge, 2012) and Developing Moral Sensitivity (Routledge, 2015). She co‐directed a 2016 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on Moral Psychology and Education. Louise Oliaro (PhD, Monash University) started her social work career in child protection. She has worked as a registered mental health practitioner with adults and children, as well as running a company providing a range of national disability services. She worked at Monash University as a member of the fieldwork team, whilst also teaching a range of subjects, including human development, group work, mental health, and skill‐based subjects. She has postgraduate education qualifications and spent eight years working in primary schools. She is currently undertaking a range of school‐based research projects including evaluation of cognitive‐based programs within primary schools, the use of play therapy in schools, and exploring the use of social work services within the Australian school setting. Sarit Pery is a PhD candidate in the Organizational Behavior group at the School of Business Administration at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Pery led development teams in the high-tech industry for twenty years and served in top-management roles. Her research interests include dyadic listening and the methodology of dyad research as evidenced in her co-authored article in Applied Psychology: An International Review. Michael Rost (PhD, University of Lancaster) is an independent scholar, author, editor, and teacher trainer based in San Francisco. Formerly a member of the TESOL faculties at Temple

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About the Authors

University and University of California, Berkeley, Michael now manages an international instructional design company, Lateral Communications. He is the author of the widely cited Listening in Language Learning (Taylor & Francis, 1991) and Teaching and Researching Listening (Routledge, 2015), as well as a number of monographs on second language oral communication instruction and assessment. He is also author or editor of several acclaimed online and classroom learning series, including: Pearson English Interactive, Contemporary Topics, English Firsthand, and Impact Issues (Pearson). He enjoys traveling, visiting classes, and meeting teachers in order to gain new insights into the best practices for teaching and learning. Susan Teubner‐Rhodes (PhD, University of Maryland, College Park) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Auburn University. She received her PhD in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science and completed post‐doctoral training in the Hearing Research Program at the Medical University of South Carolina. Dr. Teubner‐Rhodes investigates the cognitive and neural mechanisms that support language processing under conditions of uncertainty, when communication is most likely to break down. Her research combines behavioral (choice reaction time, eye‐tracking) and neuroimaging (fMRI, DTI) techniques to explore how individual differences in domain‐general cognitive functions, such as working memory, cognitive control, and persistence, affect speech and language processing across the lifespan. Karen Van Lengen (MArch, Columbia University; BA, Psychology, Vassar College), FAIA, is Kenan Professor of Architecture and former Dean (1999–2009) of the University of Virginia. Her current research focuses on the exploration of sound and communication as an integral part of the architectural design process. As a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Technologies in the Humanities, she developed the websites, Soundscape Architecture and Listening to the Lawn, that analyze and interpret site specific sounds.  Her  sound  drawings and animations (with  artist  Jim Welty)  are part of the permanent collections of  major  museums. She  has authored numerous articles and several books, including CitySpaces (Parsons School of Design, 2000), Urgent Matters (University of Virginia School of Architecture, 2009) and Vassar College: A Campus Guide  (co‐author, Lisa Reilly; Princeton Architectural Press, 2003).  Van  Lengen began her professional career as an Associate of I.M. Pei & Partners before founding her own firm in New York City, which won numerous design awards, and competitions. Andrea J. Vickery (PhD, Louisiana State University) is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at SUNY Oswego. She previously served as visiting faculty in Rhetoric and Communication Studies at the University of Richmond. She teaches undergraduate courses in interpersonal communication, communication theory, and methods. She researches supportive listening and communication in interpersonal relationships. Meagan M. Walczak (Audiology; BS, University of Massachusetts, Amherst) received her undergraduate degree in communication disorders. A member of the Student Academy of Audiology, she anticipates graduating with her doctorate of audiology from the Louisiana State University Health Science Center – New Orleans in May 2020. Angela Williams (MPH, University of New South Wales; MBA, The University of Newcastle) is Consultant Forensic Physician with the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, and Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Department of Forensic Medicine, Monash University. During her career, Williams has provided forensic medical services to many adult and child victims of sexual abuse/ assault, physical assault, and family violence, as well as to alleged offenders. She teaches nationally and internationally on her subjects and is committed to contributing to the recognition and response to preventing interpersonal violence. Her work also includes the provision of forensic medical evidence in Coronial, Criminal, and Children’s courts. She has master’s degrees in forensic medicine, business administration, health management, and public health.



About the Authors

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Brett Williams (PhD, Monash University) is the current Head, Department of Community Emergency Health and Paramedic Practice, Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Brett has won numerous national teaching awards and has published over 200 peer‐reviewed publications, 10 book chapters, 2 edited textbooks and supervised 6 PhD students to successful completion. Brett is committed to developing and finding the next generation of paramedic PhD scholars, professionalising paramedic care, and building capacity for paramedics internationally. Andrew D. Wolvin (PhD, Purdue University) is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland, College Park, and an Adjunct Professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. An internationally recognized scholar in listening behavior, Professor Wolvin has authored/co‐authored an extensive number of research studies and books, including Listening Instruction (ERIC, 1979), Listening (William C. Brown, 1996), Perspectives on Listening (Ablex, 1993), Listening in the Quality Organization (Finger Lakes Press, 1999), and Listening and Human Communication in the 21st Century (Wiley‐Blackwell, 2010). A recipient of the International Listening Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, he teaches a senior‐level course, Listening, each semester. Additionally, he has considerable experience in training and development in corporations, associations, and federal agencies.

Acknowledgments

This book would not exist without many contributions from family and colleagues. First, Margaret Fitch‐Hauser invited me to a graduate seminar, where I was introduced to the field of listening. She then mentored a budding listening scholar, offering advice and providing research critiques. I continue to value her friendship and insight. It was she who suggested I join the International Listening Association. Colleagues I met through ILA became research partners, but more importantly friends. My friendship with my co‐editor Graham Bodie has led to numerous research projects and now two books. As he notes in his acknowledgment below, our first encounter was not the most auspicious (at least from his perspective), but over the years we have developed an excellent partnership, with strengths that complement one another. We share a common goal: To expand our understanding of listening and to share that knowledge widely. Graham, I look forward to continuing our work together! Many thanks to my parents, husband, and daughter, who cheered me on throughout this project and patiently listened when the evitable frustrations arose. This book is offered in memory of my brother, who was among my biggest fans. I must thank Alex Jones, graduate student extraordinaire, for all his editorial work. Finally, I would like to express my appreciation to the School of Communication and Journalism and the College of Liberal Arts at Auburn University for the resources and research support provided throughout this project (and many others). There is no better place for an academic to call home. It’s great to be an Auburn Tiger! Debra L. Worthington Just over two decades ago I took an undergraduate course in persuasion. I worked my tail off. And I earned a B. That grade did not sit with me well for quite some time, but I have since learned to laugh about it, and I have maintained a friendship and collaborative partnership to boot. As you might guess, the instructor‐of‐record was my co‐editor, Debra Worthington, with whom I continue to do some of my best thinking and writing. Debra’s work ethic and principled approach continue to inspire me and allow me to be creative. More importantly, our collaboration helps maintain a hopefulness that listening will indeed become a unified field of study. Thank you, Debra, for being such a wonderful collaborator. To my family: Thank you for continuing to allow me to mess up, to not always live up to ideal listening but providing a safe space to be a better version of myself. To my new academic home, in which I was able to devote time to this project, The University of Mississippi has been a wonderful place to grow not only as an academic but also a practitioner of listening. And to my students, the true reason for

xxii Acknowledgments staying within the walls of the academy. Thank you for challenging me and my oftentimes silly ideas and for providing added perspective on how we can fully understand the human condition. Mostly, thanks for putting up with me when I go on tangents about philosophy at eight‐o‐clock in the morning. Graham D. Bodie We would both like to extend our sincere appreciation to the Wiley‐Blackwell team, particularly Todd Green, Executive Editor; Ajith Kumar, Project Editor, and Skyler Van Valkenburgh, Editorial Assistant. As we write this, our second major project with Wiley comes to a close. The experience was seamless from the beginning, and we are ever grateful for the service you provide to the academic community. Thanks for being promoters of such an important life skill. As long‐time members of the International Listening Association, we also both owe a debt of gratitude to the many members of that organization who have helped us think more critically about listening. Finally, we want to thank the reviewers who helped us see beyond our view of the field and encouraged us to push its boundaries. Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie

Introduction Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie

Handbooks are essential resources for scholars, practitioners, and students, providing ­contemporary literature reviews, guidelines for research, cutting‐edge theoretical insights, and examples of important contexts for practice. They are critical to the growth and advancement of a field and offer the potential markings of an academic discipline. While there are several resources for related areas such as audiology (e.g., Katz, Chasin, English, Hood, & Tillery, 2015), language development (e.g., Hoff & Shatz, 2009), musicology (e.g., Bader, 2018), and sound studies (Pinch & Bijsterveld, 2012), this text marks the first publication of a handbook specific to listening scholarship, broadly construed. We took on the challenge of this publication first and foremost to fill an important gap in the listening literature. Currently, to gain an adequate grasp of the myriad ways in which listening impacts people and institutions, it is necessary to read across multiple academic disciplines. Indeed, research on listening is published across the academic landscape, making it difficult for anyone to stay abreast of emerging trends, at least outside of their own disciplinary insularity. This text thus serves as a key scholarly resource that cuts across disciplinary divides, making it possible for new and established students, researchers, and practitioners of listening in a variety of disciplines (e.g., audiology, communication studies, language acquisition, linguistics, psychology) to learn about key methodological, conceptual, and theoretical issues in the field. Our primary goals in this Introduction are to: (i) orient the reader to our understanding of what constitutes a field of listening; and (ii) provide a roadmap of the book. We begin with a brief discussion of how we view the present state of listening scholarship followed by an overview of disciplines contributing to our understanding of listening. We then touch on several central contexts within which listening is most often applied. We end the Introduction with a view toward the future.

A Discipline of Listening? Defining and identifying what constitutes a discipline is not easy (Becher & Trowler, 2001). To understand what is (and is not) interdisciplinary inquiry first requires some understanding and agreement as to what constitutes a discipline (see Hunt, 1994; Krishnan, 2009; Moran, 2001). The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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In his discussion of what makes one area of study a discipline and another interdisciplinary, Krishnan (2009) noted that the term discipline refers to “the organisation of learning and the systematic production of new knowledge” (p. 9). He outlined six general characteristics for distinguishing between a subject and a discipline (p. 9–10): 1. disciplines have a particular object of research (e.g. law, society, politics), though the object of research may be shared with another discipline; 2. disciplines have a body of accumulated specialist knowledge referring to their object of research, which is specific to them and not generally shared with another discipline; 3. disciplines have theories and concepts that can organise the accumulated specialist knowledge effectively; 4. disciplines use specific terminologies or a specific technical language adjusted to their research object; 5. disciplines have developed specific research methods according to their specific research requirements; and maybe most crucially, 6. disciplines must have some institutional manifestation in the form of subjects taught at universities or colleges, respective academic departments, and professional associations connected to it. Only through institutionalisation are disciplines able to reproduce themselves from one generation to the next by means of specific educational preparation. According to Krishnan (2009), in general, the more criteria that are met, the greater the likelihood a recognizable, reproducible, growing discipline can be identified. Criteria may not be met for several reasons, most commonly a “lack of theorisation or lack of specific methodologies, which usually diminishes the status of a field of research” (p. 10). Newer areas of study, he argued, “either aim at remaining ‘undisciplined’, as women’s studies did in the 1970s, or they can engage in the process of their disciplinarisation and institutionalisation” (p. 10). In many ways, listening has the markings of an academic discipline. There has, over the past several decades, been an emergence of a “freestanding community…with its own professional associations and specialist journals” (Becher & Trowler, 2001, p. 41; see Criteria 6). For instance, the International Listening Association (ILA) has sponsored the International Journal of Listening since 1987, and members of that association have been publishing books that highlight listening as a complex cognitive and social skill since the 1970s (e.g. Barker, 1971). Of course, to say that listening is a full‐fledged discipline simply because of the existence of a single organization or journal seems a stretch. Other criteria seem particularly problematic for listening to rise to the status of a discipline. For example, to our knowledge, there exists no “Department of Listening” at any recognized college or university (Criterion 6), although it is taught as a subject at several. Instead, listening is more often embedded as a topic within other courses. Likewise, a number of scholars have commented on the general lack of cohesive theories specific to listening (Criteria 3; see Bodie, 2011; Janusik, 2007; Wolvin, Halone, & Coakley, 1999). In our opinion, then, listening is best categorized as a field of study, or at least that is one of the main outcomes we hope to catalyze with this handbook. According to Van den Besselaar and Heimeriks (2001), we can think of an academic field along a continuum of integration, marked by points that many readers will find familiar. In particular, an interdisciplinary approach to research is marked by integration of multiple disciplinary approaches, while “in multidisciplinary research, the subject under study is approached from different angles, using different disciplinary perspectives. However, neither the theoretical perspectives nor the findings of the various disciplines are integrated in the end” (p. 706). Based on Krishnan’s (2009) perspective, and as this book illustrates, listening scholars experience multiple overlapping areas, with “constantly shifting and expanding knowledge formations” (p. 12). The goal, then, of interdisciplinary research is to generate more comprehensive understanding. This handbook attempts to create the conditions for a more comprehensive understanding of listening.

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Based on this distinction between multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary, contemporary listening scholarship seems to more accurately fly under the multidisciplinary flag. Presently, several disciplines lay claim to developing theories of how and why listening is possible, methods that can test key facets of those theories, and pedagogical strategies that seek to teach people how to engage in listening more effectively in specified contexts. These different methodological, theoretical, and applied approaches, however, are not fully integrated. Rather, scholars who study listening are more likely than not approaching its study from a single disciplinary perspective without much cross‐pollination. Again, our hope is that this book provides the seeds for such cross‐pollination and thus helps move the field toward interdisciplinary status.

Overview of the Book The handbook is organized into five parts. Part I, Methodological Approaches, includes chapters that delineate primary methods for studying listening: physiological, phenomenological, interpretive, and empirical. These approaches span disciplines, even if certain disciplines tend toward one or two approaches (e.g., audiologists primarily utilize physiological approaches, interpersonal communication scholars tend to utilize empirical, and to some extent, interpretive approaches). We begin the book by discussing methods not because we view them as the primary driver of research, but rather because any given method can be used regardless of the specific disciplinary training a scholar has received. Indeed, while in graduate school, both of us (Debra and Graham) took methods classes inside and outside of our home discipline of Communication. Part II of this handbook includes 11 chapters that outline what listening research looks like from distinct disciplinary perspectives that clearly meet Krishnan’s (2009) six criteria. We write this sentence with the following caveats: (i) While some of these chapters represent a clear discipline in the traditional sense (e.g., Audiology, Psychology), other chapters include perspectives that are more adequately described as non‐disciplinary fields of study (e.g., Sound Studies); and (ii) even among what are often considered traditional disciplines, there are sub‐disciplines that contain divergent viewpoints on listening or that may not focus at all on listening. The Musicology chapter provides a good example. As Brattico and Haumann observe, “musicology has an array of subdisciplines or associated areas of study … [and] shares research areas with disciplines such as biology, sociology, psychology, and education”. With these caveats in mind, we present Table  I.1 to demonstrate the variability of how scholars from diverse disciplines define listening. In some cases, chapter authors provide explicit discipline‐specific definitions (e.g., Audiology, Interpersonal Communication, Psychology), while others provide a range of listening definitions (e.g., Architecture, Management and Leadership, Media Studies). In these latter cases, we chose a single definition that, in our opinion, best reflected the material covered in that chapter. Whether viewed as a strategy for engaging with others (e.g., Interpersonal Communication, Management and Leadership), with one’s environment (e.g., Architecture, Sound Studies), or even with one’s self (e.g., Philosophy), one commonality across these definitions is the idea that listening is an active process. As such, these definitions are similar to the hundreds of other definitions one can find among scholars who study listening (for a recent review, see Worthington & Bodie, 2018b). In addition, the complexity of just what constitutes listening is framed within these definitions. While some authors focus on cognitive processes (e.g., Audiology, Psychology, Language Learning, Linguistics), others emphasize affective (e.g., Architecture, Sound Studies) and/or behavioral (e.g., Interpersonal Communication) processes. As we have written elsewhere (Worthington & Bodie, 2018a), the cognitive, affect, and behavioral processes that constitute listening are not always shared between models of listening,

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Table I.1  Examples of listening definitions from disciplinary chapters. Discipline

Definition

Architecture

“An innovative and generative practice...a strategy of engagement that we employ deliberately to explore a different landscape other than the one framed by vision” (Voegelin, 2014, p. 12).

Audiology

An active process, requiring us first to pay attention to, then process selected auditory stimuli, all while ignoring other auditory information.

Interpersonal Communication

A behavior enacted by an individual in the service of communicating/ interacting with others.

Language Learning

The primary modality that enables speech perception and language learning.

Linguistics

How people understand spoken language, conceptualized as (i) a complex process that involves both bottom‐up (literal) and top‐down (inferential) processes (Brown, 2017) and (ii) an essential skill for language acquisition in both first and second language contexts.

Management and Leadership

A relational construct that involves “seeing the expressed idea and attitude from the other person’s point of view, sensing how it feels to the person, achieving his or her frame of reference about the subject being discussed” (Rogers & Roethlisberger, 1991/1952, p. 106).

Media Studies

An important key to the experience of and engagement with media, and the ways in which we can engage with each other through media.

Musicology

Analytical mode of information processing performed by listeners with or without training in music theory; how we hear organized sound intensities, pitches, timbres, and durations.

Philosophy

A cognitive activity that serves the epistemic goal of advancing knowledge but that does not require interaction with other agents or sound.

Psychology

The intentional selection, organization, and integration of verbal and nonverbal information provided in oral and/or audio communication.

Sound Studies

The primary way that humans experience sound.

even though there are some commonalities. For example, attention, perception, selection – all traditionally considered aspects of listening  –  are highlighted in multiple definitions (e.g., Language Learning, Linguistics, Psychology); these definitions, however, also include additional perspectives of cognition. In the Philosophy chapter, for instance, Mower focuses primarily on the introspective nature of listening, arguing that listening is a goal‐driven activity. Motivation is typically linked with affective listening processes, but in terms of attending to and responding to others. We see the emphasis on affective processes directly and indirectly touched upon in other chapter definitions, such as Management and Leadership as well as Musicology. The idea of motivation is emphasized further in the teaching (e.g., Classroom Setting, Music Education, Adult Learners) and context (e.g., Relational Lawyering, Health Care, Health Democracy) chapters. Finally, behavioral processes  –  verbal and nonverbal responding  –  are more often alluded to, than directly addressed (see, for example, Architecture, Psychology, Media Studies, Interpersonal Communication). The under representation of listening behaviors has also been found in how scholars tend to measure this construct (see Bodie, 2018). Part III, Teaching Listening, addresses listening pedagogy and general instructional design and assessment, while also touching on the scholarship of teaching and learning in instructional contexts, such as music and medical education that emphasize building listening skills. The part begins with a chapter from Rost that outlines several pedagogic principles, steps and standards of instruction, and guidelines for assessment. The second chapter in this part, by Laham, details specific considerations when teaching listening in K‐12 and higher education. We followed the Lahman chapter with one by Johnson focused on music education given its

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prevalence and importance to social and cognitive development. To complement the focus on children and adolescents, the last two chapters focus on adult learners. Brownell outlines her influential HURIER model and its application in organizational training and development, while Meldrum and Apple review the state‐of‐the‐art in how listening is taught in the medical curriculum. Part IV contains chapters that showcase additional contexts in which listening plays a p ­ ivotal role in effective interactions, whether at the interpersonal, group, or societal level. Continuing a theme raised by Manusov in Interpersonal Communication, Jones and Joyer integrate the literature on interpersonal mindfulness with work on active‐empathic listening. Ultimately, mindfulness is offered as a key metacognitive mechanism that makes active‐empathic listening possible and thus its many personal and relational benefits. Although not explicitly referenced, such a mindful approach is implied in Levine’s chapter on lying and deception detection. In particular, he argues for a critical listening that “triangulates various types of information, asks follow‐up questions when possible, and after‐the‐fact fact checks to make the most informed judgments possible while recognizing uncertainty” (this volume). At the same time, the critical ­listener understands that most people are honest most of the time and thus constantly listening in a state of suspicion may not be advantageous for personal well‐being or relationship satisfaction. While much of our listening is accomplished interpersonally, there are clearly ways of listening in mediated spaces. Bond explores these possibilities along with the role of technology in shaping listening preferences and behavior. The role of technology to assist organizational listening is also addressed by Macnamara, whose chapter focuses on the role of listening in participatory democracy. Between Bond and Macnamara are two additional chapters. The first investigates how listening is used to improve interactions in legal contexts, while the second explores healthcare contexts. Both chapters recognize listening as a relational phenomenon, with Brooks stating so explicitly with her development of “relational lawyering.” Even so, McKenna, Brown, Oliaro, Williams, and Williams acknowledge the recent shift in the health professions from conceiving of listening as a diagnostic function to a more person‐centered approach requiring deep listening to patient stories and experiences. The final part, Part V, is titled Emerging Perspectives because we feel these three chapters illustrate areas that stand to push listening scholarship forward. Each chapter demonstrates true interdisciplinarity (i.e., integration of perspectives, or disciplines). Performative Listening is defined as a way of theorizing and practicing listening as an embodied and sensory act constituted by and constitutive of relational, cultural, and historical configurations. Although performative listening emerged from the sub‐discipline of Performance Studies, it draws from Sound Studies and various phenomenological approaches forcing integration of several perspectives on what it means to exist by and through listening. In Augmented Reality, the role and ability of technology to elicit social responses in shared virtual spaces is explored. To author their chapter, Miller and Bailenson necessarily integrated Interpersonal Communication, Psychology, and Sound Studies scholarship, to name just a few. Likewise, Beyene, in his discussion of listening and peace building, draws from Philosophy, Interpersonal Communication, and a host of interpretive approaches to research. The part ends with Silence. In this chapter, Clair integrates critical scholarship, semiotics, ethnomethodology, and linguistics, among other perspectives to explore the dialectical nature of silence and listening.

Conclusion Our ultimate hope is that The Handbook of Listening will serve as a comprehensive scholarly resource and reference for students, researchers, teachers, and scholars of listening, broadly defined and located across the academic landscape. Its aim is to highlight the breadth and depth of the field, to draw attention to the richness of listening theory and research, and to

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move scholars from their often disciplinary silos, with the goal of spurring interdisciplinary study and eventual integration. Needless to say, the chapters we were fortunate enough to include present only a snapshot of the study of listening within each of the respective disciplines and contexts. We are also certain that some will take exception to what is missing (and perhaps what is covered) within these pages. We welcome the discussions and critiques that follow the publication of this text – they are signals of the vibrancy and growing interest as well as the interdisciplinary nature of the field.

References Bader, R. (Ed.) (2018). Springer handbook of systematic musicology. Leipzig: Springer. Barker, L. L. (1971). Listening behavior. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice‐Hall. Becher, T., & Trowler, P. R. (2001). Academic tribes and territories (2nd ed.). Philadelphia, PA: The Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press. Bodie, G. D. (2011). Theory and the advancement of listening research: A reply to Purdy. International Journal of Listening, 25, 139–144. doi:10.1080/10904018.2011.537149 Bodie, G. D. (2018). Measuring behavioral components of listening. In D. L. Worthington & G. D. Bodie (Eds.), The Sourcebook of listening research: Methodology and measures (pp. 123–150). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Brown, G. (2017). Listening to spoken English. New York: Routledge. Hoff, E., & Shatz, M. (Eds.). (2009). Blackwell handbook of language development. Sussex: John Wiley & Sons. Hunt, L. (1994). The virtues of disciplinarity. Eighteenth‐Century Studies, 28, 1–7. doi:10.2307/2739218 Janusik, L. A. (2007). Building listening theory: The validation of the Conversational Listening Span. Communication Studies, 58, 139–156. doi:10.1080/10510970701341089 Katz, J., Chasin, M., English, K., Hood, L. J., & Tillery, K. L. (Eds.) (2015). Handbook of clinical audiology (5th ed.). Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, Williams, & Wilkins. Krishnan, A. (2009). What are academic disciplines? Some observations on the disciplinarity vs. interdisciplinarity debate. NCRM Working Paper Series 03/09. ESRC National Centre for Research Methods. Moran, J. (2001). Interdisciplinarity: The new critical idiom. London: Routledge. Pinch, T., & Bijsterveld, K. (Eds.) (2012). The Oxford handbook of sound studies. New York: Oxford University Press. Rogers, C. R., & Roethlisberger, F. J. (1991/1952). HBR classic – Barriers and gateways to communication (Reprinted from Harvard Business Review, July/August, 1952). Harvard Business Review, 69, 105–111. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/1991/11/barriers‐and‐gateways‐to‐communication Van den Besselaar, P., & Heimeriks, G. (2001, July). Disciplinary, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary: Concepts and indicators. In M. Davis & C. S. Wilson (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics: Proceedings ISSI‐2001 (pp. 705–716). Sydney: University of New South Wales. Voegelin, S. (2014). Sonic possible worlds. New York: Bloomsbury. Wolvin, A. D., Halone, K. K., & Coakley, C. G. (1999). An assessment of the “intellectual discussion” on listening theory and research. International Journal of Listening, 13, 111–129. doi:10.1080/10 904018.1999.10499030 Worthington, D. L., & Bodie, G. D. (Eds.) (2018a). The sourcebook of listening research: Methodology and measures. West Sussex, U.K.: Wiley‐Blackwell. Worthington, D. L., & Bodie, G. D. (2018b). Defining listening: A historical, theoretical and pragmatic assessment. In D. L. Worthington & G. D. Bodie (Eds.), The sourcebook of listening research: Methodology and measures (pp. 3–17). New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.

PART I

Methodological Approaches

This part contains four chapters that delineate the primary methods used to study listening: physiological approaches, phenomenological approaches, interpretive approaches, and empirical approaches. Each chapter (i) focuses on the philosophical underpinnings of the methodological approach; (ii) provides an overview of specific methods within that approach; (iii) discusses relevant design and analysis decisions; (iv) reviews common ways listening research does or does not meet current standards of practice; and (v) offers recommendations for future study and/or means of improving future research.

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Physiological Approaches Susan Teubner‐Rhodes and Stefanie E. Kuchinsky1

Listening involves more than just hearing. Sound waves induce changes in the hair cells of the ear, which then must be transformed into an abstract understanding of the speaker’s message (see Hurley, this volume). During typical listening, acoustic, linguistic, and cognitive processes are engaged to varying degrees. These processes adapt when faced with adverse listening ­conditions (e.g., background noise, accented speech; Mattys, Davis, Bradlow, & Scott, 2012). Indeed, distinctions are often made between the perception, recognition, and understanding of speech materials (see Imhof, this volume). Many audiological assessments of listening‐related deficits utilize self‐report and behavioral tests of auditory function, such as when individuals are asked to identify pure tones or words. These measures are straightforward to collect and are diagnostic of myriad communication‐ related deficits. Even individuals that do not meet diagnostic criteria for a hearing or language impairment can experience substantial difficulty listening in challenging conditions, such as background noise. In such cases, individuals may increasingly engage top‐down resources as they work harder to maintain high levels of performance. Sustaining such listening effort could result in fatigue and disengagement from social interactions (McGarrigle et al., 2014), especially for older adults and individuals with hearing loss or other communication disorders. These findings suggest that hearing assessments may be complemented by also measuring the extent to which higher‐order brain functions compensate for degraded acoustic input in order to support accurate speech understanding. This chapter focuses on physiological methods used to track the function of the central ­nervous system during listening. They include, but are not limited to, indirect or direct measures of cortical or subcortical activity (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging ­ [fMRI], Magnetoencephalography/Electroencephalography [M/EEG]), or autonomic nervous system function (pupillometry). As will be described, these measures provide varying degrees of temporal and spatial precision about when and where processes occur in the brain during listening. By improving our understanding of the mechanisms that contribute to healthy ­communication, physiological measures improve our ability to detect and remediate problems for individuals who experience listening difficulties. The views expressed in this chapter are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy of the Department of Army/Navy/Air Force, Department of Defense, or American Government.

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fMRI Approaches to Listening fMRI is based on the principle that as people perform a task, cerebral blood flow to local brain regions increases with neuronal activity (see Bandettini, 2012; Fox, 2012 for review). As this blood supply arrives, the concentration of oxygenated to deoxygenated blood slowly increases over the course of several seconds, peaks, and then begins to return to baseline levels (Buckner, 1998; Fox & Raichle, 1986). This Gaussian‐shaped signal is called the Blood‐Oxygen Level Dependent (BOLD) response. Changes in the BOLD signal, as a result of varying stimuli or task demands, indirectly reflect neuronal activity associated with those stimulating tasks and events (Ogawa et al., 1992). The Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner captures the BOLD signal by acquiring a three‐dimensional image of the entire brain (i.e., a whole‐brain volume) at regular intervals throughout a task. MRI has good spatial resolution (1–3 mm3), but poor temporal precision due to the time it takes for the BOLD signal to unfold.

Design Considerations for Auditory fMRI The advent of the event‐related design for fMRI revolutionized cognitive neuroscience research. Event‐related designs present different types of stimuli in rapid succession, with inter‐trial intervals as short as two seconds. BOLD responses to such rapidly‐presented stimuli overlap in time, but researchers can use advanced statistical techniques to isolate BOLD activity associated with an individual stimulus or event (Buckner, 1998; Dale & Buckner, 1997). A major consideration for fMRI studies of listening is that the scanner produces a loud, sustained sound while collecting back‐to‐back three‐dimensional images (i.e., volumes) of the brain. This noise poses a particular challenge for auditory fMRI because it partly masks auditory stimuli (Edmister, Talavage, Ledden, & Weisskoff, 1999). Moreover, this task‐irrelevant scanner noise elicits a robust BOLD response in auditory cortex, which limits the magnitude of the BOLD response to target auditory stimuli (Di Salle et al., 2003). Neuroscientists have therefore adopted special image acquisition protocols that allow presentation of stimuli in relative quiet. Most of these methods fall under the category of “sparse sampling” in which whole‐brain images are collected less often, sacrificing some temporal precision in order to present stimuli in relative quiet in between the noisy scans (Edmister et al., 1999; Hall et al., 1999). In sparse sampling approaches, the time between scans (e.g., 8 or more seconds; also called repetition time) is much longer than the time it takes to acquire each whole‐brain volume (e.g., 2 seconds). This allows auditory stimuli to be presented in the relatively silent period between noisy scans. Because the BOLD response peaks about 6 seconds after stimulus onset (Banich & Compton, 2018), delaying image acquisition in this manner allows for the capture of the maximum BOLD amplitude, but not the rest of the BOLD response. As a method, sparse sampling yields robust BOLD responses to auditory stimulation (Edmister et al., 1999; Hall et al., 1999), but has poorer temporal resolution. Additionally, sparse sampling requires longer sampling intervals, which restrict the number of trials that can be presented within an experiment and reduces the statistical power of the study. Researchers have adopted several alternatives to address the limitations associated with sparse sampling. One approach is to shorten the quiet interval between scans. For instance, Orfanidou, Marslen‐Wilson, and Davis (2006) presented spoken words in a 1.4 second “silent” period within a 2.5 second repetition time to identify regions where word repetition was associated with lower brain activity. However, this design is only appropriate for studies that meet certain conditions. First, the auditory stimuli were isolated words: longer utterances require longer intervals between scans to preserve acoustical integrity and avoid acoustic masking and scanner‐induced activity in auditory cortex. Second, shortening the scan interval allowed more



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trials to be presented, providing sufficient statistical power. Finally, participants responded manually: oral responses tend to be associated with head movements that require longer inter‐ scan intervals so that the head can stabilize before collecting images. Other approaches aim to improve the temporal resolution of auditory fMRI, such as the Interleaved Silent Steady State (ISSS) method (Schwarzbauer, Davis, Rodd, & Johnsrude, 2006). Like sparse sampling, ISSS uses a quiet period between the acquisition of whole‐brain images. However, this sequence also silently excites brain tissue between scans in order to maintain the magnetic properties necessary to observe the BOLD signal. This allows multiple, sequential whole‐brain images to be acquired following stimulus presentation, rather than the single image collected in sparse sampling. ISSS thus provides greater insight into the temporal dynamics of the BOLD signal than conventional sparse sampling. However, a limit of this approach is that the magnitude of the BOLD response for sustained auditory stimuli (e.g., sentences) is reduced when measured with ISSS versus conventional sparse sampling (Schwarzbauer et al., 2006). Multiband acceleration of the fMRI sequence speeds up image acquisition by collecting multiple slices of the brain volume in parallel. When used with a sparse sampling design, this approach can increase the silent period between volume acquisitions, obtain more image volumes within the same time period, and/or increase spatial resolution or coverage (De Martino, Moerel, Ugurbil, Formisano, & Yacoub, 2015). For instance, De Martino et al. (2015) accelerated image acquisition by a factor of two to increase the silent period between scans from 1.5 to 2.25 seconds. Sound stimuli elicited greater activation in bilateral superior temporal gyrus and the left planum temporale with multiband compared to conventional imaging sequences. Reducing the duration of the scanner noise thus increases sensitivity to auditory stimulation. However, this study used a relatively short interval between scans (3 seconds; De Martino et al., 2015). When longer intervals are needed (e.g., to present longer stimuli), using multiband acceleration to increase spatial resolution or acquire more volumes may be more beneficial than decreasing acquisition time. Some researchers have bypassed sparse sampling by developing quieter versions of standard continuous sampling protocols that can reduce scanner noise by about 20 dB (Schmitter et al., 2008). While the parameters of this approach must be customized for the acoustics of each scanner (see Schmitter et al., 2008), it emits less acoustical noise and thus is less disruptive to auditory presentation. Compared to sparse sampling, Peelle, Eason, Schmitter, Schwarzbauer, and Davis (2010) reported that quieter acquisition protocols detected stronger auditory cortex responses to spoken sentences relative to amplitude‐matched noise. However, quieter acquisition also produced greater activity in frontal regions associated with effortful listening, suggesting that participants still had to expend additional effort to extract auditory stimuli from the scanner noise. Finally, they found that quieter acquisition protocols had greater image distortion (i.e., loss of BOLD signal) in the posterior inferior temporal lobe (pITL), a semantic processing region. Because different research questions require different designs, there is no gold standard method for auditory fMRI. Despite the heterogeneity of auditory fMRI designs, reviews and meta‐analyses have enabled broad consensus on the basic organization of the auditory and language systems. We advocate using the fMRI technique that is most appropriate given experimental design considerations, and interpreting the results in light of methodological limitations and the extant literature. To follow, we provide a broad overview of the literature on auditory fMRI for researchers interested in getting started.

Mapping of Auditory and Speech Systems fMRI is a powerful tool for mapping the functional organization of the human auditory system. The development of neuroimaging was crucial for demonstrating that the human auditory cortex is “tonotopic,” meaning that it represents sound frequencies in a predictable

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order that parallels the organization of the cochlea (Talavage, Gonzalez‐Castillo, & Scott, 2014). The human auditory cortex contains several distinct areas or tonotopic maps along specific regions – the bilateral superior temporal gyrus, Heschl’s gyrus (HG), and Heschl’s sulcus (Talavage et al., 2004). Listening requires more than simply representing acoustic frequency. During speech processing, the brain must encode how sound frequencies change over time (i.e., spectro‐ temporal information) as well as higher‐level phonetic and semantic features. The auditory cortex is organized hierarchically, with frequency information represented in the center of HG and more complex spectro‐temporal acoustics represented in surrounding areas (Joanisse & DeSouza, 2014). For instance, low‐level acoustic information like pitch is represented in primary auditory cortex (HG) while phonetic‐ and word‐representations are represented in mid‐to‐anterior superior temporal gyrus (DeWitt & Rauschecker, 2012). One influential model of the organization of language in the brain is called the dual‐stream model (Hickok & Poeppel, 2004, 2007). Work supporting this model suggests there are two main cortical pathways via which acoustic information is transformed into lexical and semantic representations and into motor representations. These are the ventral pathway (proceeding generally along lower portions of cortex) and the dorsal pathway (proceeding along upper portions of cortex), respectively. More specifically, acoustic processing in bilateral superior temporal gyrus proceeds ventrally into pITL for lexicosemantic analysis and dorsally into left temporoparietal and frontal cortex to transform sound representations into motor‐based articulatory gestures (Hickok & Poeppel, 2004, 2007). Language comprehension relies heavily on ventral stream pITL regions, where sounds are mapped to lexical items and their meanings (e.g., the sounds D‐O‐G must be interpreted as the word “dog” and connected to the concept of a beloved family pet). Words may be combined into meaningful phrases and sentences through the interface between pITL and the anterior temporal lobe (Hickok & Poeppel, 2004, 2007). In the dorsal stream, the left temporoparietal junction, inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), and premotor cortex may facilitate comprehension of complex sentences and discourse by supporting sub‐ vocal rehearsal to retain information in verbal working memory (Hickok & Poeppel, 2004). Taken together, fMRI studies have provided insight into how auditory cortex represents complex acoustical information and how listeners translate this information into meaningful speech.

Mapping of Cognitive Systems During Listening fMRI has also revealed the cognitive processes that are engaged during successful listening as well as those associated with listening effort (see Peelle, 2018 for review). Background noise from irrelevant sources in our environment can interfere with our ability to listen to a specific speaker. Understanding speech in noisy environments involves separating the speech into a coherent auditory stream, ignoring irrelevant sounds, and resolving lexical conflicts that may arise. Listening draws on brain regions involved in executive control and attention as speech intelligibility decreases. Low speech intelligibility can occur due to individual differences, such as hearing loss and processing speed, or external factors like background noise and speaker clarity (Rogers & Peelle, 2019). Eckert, Teubner‐Rhodes, and Vaden’s (2016) meta‐analysis of fMRI studies of listening in normative populations compared relatively clear listening conditions to conditions in which speech was degraded due to background noise or other distortions. They observed that listeners engaged the bilateral frontal operculum (part of the IFG) and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) within the cingulo‐opercular (CO) network (see Figure 1.1) more so in the degraded conditions. This finding extends to older adults and individuals with hearing loss (Vaden, Kuchinsky, Ahlstrom, Dubno, & Eckert, 2015; Vaden et al., 2016). Younger and older adults also engage the IFG when listening to syntactically‐complex relative to simpler sentences (Peelle, Troiani, Wingfield, & Grossman, 2010).



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Figure 1.1  A meta‐analysis showed increased cingulo‐opercular activity in response to challenging listening conditions (Eckert et al., 2016). Figure reprinted with permission from Eckert, Teubner‐ Rhodes, & Vaden. (2016). Is listening in noise worth it? The neurobiology of speech recognition in challenging listening conditions. Ear and Hearing, 37, 101S–110S. https://journals.lww.com/ear‐ hearing/fulltext/2016/07001/Is_Listening_in_Noise_Worth_It__The_Neurobiology.12.aspx. Ear and Hearing is the official journal of the American Auditory Society.

Importantly, the CO network is not auditory‐ or language‐specific but responds to increased cognitive demands more generally across auditory, visual, and sensorimotor tasks. The CO cortex may function to detect when errors have been made and/or uncertainty about how to respond to stimuli, in order to re‐establish attentional control and improve subsequent performance (Eckert et  al., 2016). dACC activity in particular may reflect cognitive persistence, when individuals apply effort to overcome task difficulty (Teubner‐Rhodes, Vaden, Dubno, & Eckert, 2017). Indeed, greater persistence on a visuospatial reasoning task was associated with a larger performance benefit following elevated dACC activity during speech recognition in background noise (Teubner‐Rhodes et  al., 2017). Additionally, CO activity decreases when speech becomes completely unintelligible (Zekveld, Heslenfeld, Festen, & Schoonhoven, 2006), suggesting that participants only recruit these regions when trying to optimize their performance. Thus, listeners appear to engage domain‐general frontal regions to increase effort and improve performance when speech recognition becomes challenging.

Electrophysiological Approaches to Listening While fMRI indirectly measures neural function via changes in blood oxygenation, EEG and MEG directly measure underlying activity of large populations of neurons by recording electrical potentials (EEG) and electromagnetic fields (MEG) from an array of sensors placed around the scalp (Coles & Rugg, 1995; Lee, Larson, Maddox, & Shinn‐Cunningham, 2014). M/EEG signals may increase when neuronal firing rate increases, when neurons fire simultaneously, and when oscillations in activity across communicating populations of neurons are in phase with one another (Weisz & Obleser, 2014). Because M/EEG techniques directly measure changes in voltage or magnetic fields that are produced by neuronal activity, they have a high temporal resolution on the order of milliseconds (Lee et  al., 2014). However, spatial resolution is poor – it is difficult to map this brain activity as sensors reflect the summation of activity produced by both distal and proximal neuronal generators (Coles & Rugg, 1995; Weisz & Obleser, 2014). While some modeling approaches can provide insight into the location of neuronal generators from the observed signals, these statistical techniques require making anatomical assumptions or acquiring MRI data to constrain the number of solutions (Lee et al., 2014). The signal at each sensor is derived by comparing voltage to a baseline reference sensor (Coles & Rugg, 1995). Signal analyses fall into two broad classes: event‐related potentials

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(ERPs) and phase coherence. For ERPs, an analysis window is time‐locked to the stimulus presentation, and the signal is averaged across trials to isolate activity associated with events of interest (Coles & Rugg, 1995). Phase coherence analyses examine the power of the signal in different frequency bands (Weisz & Obleser, 2014) and can be used to assess the degree to which populations of neurons synchronize activity with each other (temporal synchrony) and with the presentation of the auditory stimulus itself (neural entrainment). Although design considerations may depend on the primary dependent variable of interest, ERP and phase coherence measures can be analyzed within the same dataset. We discuss elements of each type of signal analysis further.

ERP Measures of Listening A few classic paradigms are essential to understanding the auditory ERP literature. The basic auditory ERP task simply presents brief, sequential auditory stimuli and measures the electrical potential from the onset of each stimulus until the onset of the next stimulus (or other pre‐defined timepoint). This task allows researchers to examine how the brain represents acoustical features of auditory stimuli. A special version of this task is the auditory oddball task, in which a single “standard” stimulus is presented repeatedly along with the occasional presentation of a different “deviant” stimulus. ERPs in response to the deviant are compared to the standard to demonstrate how the brain represents novelty. Finally, the dichotic listening task presents two separate auditory streams simultaneously, one to each ear. The listener is told to pay attention to one ear, and ignore the other. Researchers evaluate how attention modulates ERPs by comparing the responses to attended and unattended stimuli. We will discuss further ERP components that are observed in the brainstem and cortex in response to auditory stimuli in these paradigms.

Auditory Brainstem Response (ABR)

The ABR is a series of waveforms generated in response to brief auditory stimuli measuring the electrical potential from the peripheral nervous system through the brainstem. The first wave (called Wave I) occurs in the auditory nerve about 2 milliseconds (ms) after stimulus presentation (Goldie, 1992; Moller & Jannetta, 1985). Typically, responses take about 4 ms to propagate through the brainstem, so each evoked waveform roughly corresponds to processing in a different point along this pathway (Goldie, 1992; Moller & Jannetta, 1985). Researchers disagree over the exact sources of Waves II–V, but they reflect activity of respective ascending neural projections through the brainstem: the cochlear nucleus, superior olive, medial and lateral lemniscus, and inferior colliculus (Goldie, 1992; Moller & Jannetta, 1985). A major advantage of the ABR is that it can be used to assess hearing function in populations who cannot respond overtly, such as infants. It is also useful in diagnosing auditory neuropathy, a disorder caused by dysfunction of the auditory nerve that disproportionately affects understanding of speech (Picton, Taylor, & Durieux‐Smith, 2005).

Auditory ERPs in the Cortex

Acoustic stimulation reaches the cortex about 20 ms after the onset of an auditory stimulus. Major auditory ERPs generated by the cortex include the P50, N1, P2, P3, N400, and P600. The letters in ERP components indicate whether waveforms have positive (P) or negative (N) peaks, measured as deflections from the electrical potential at baseline. Numbers indicate the approximate timing of the peak amplitude in milliseconds (N1, P2, and P3 are shorthand for components occurring at 100, 200, and 300 ms, respectively). MEG components are denoted by an “M” prefix but otherwise follow the same convention. The first cortical responses to auditory stimuli are observed in primary auditory cortex, with clear ERP peaks occurring at 20, 30, and 50 ms (Chait, Simon, & Poeppel, 2004). These early



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auditory components primarily reflect the acoustic profile of the stimulus (Hillyard & Kutas, 1983). For instance, the M/P50 exhibits a higher amplitude in response to broadband noise than pure‐tones but is generally unaffected by task demands (Chait et al., 2004). This suggests that the M/P50 is an obligatory response to broadband auditory stimulation. Attention may, however, modulate early ERPs in dichotic listening studies designed to maximize acoustic ­differences between attended and unattended channels (Woldorff et  al., 1993; Woldorff & Hillyard, 1991). In sum, attentional filtering based on physical stimulus characteristics (e.g., pitch and duration) may emerge in the auditory cortex as early as 20–50 ms post‐stimulus onset, but these ERPs largely reflect acoustic properties. The M100/N1 component is a negative deflection peaking around 100 ms post‐stimulus onset that appears to originate in the auditory cortex and the planum temporale (Chait et al., 2004; Tomé, Barbosa, Nowak, & Marques‐Teixeira, 2015) and is followed by a positive‐going wave around 200 ms (Harris, Mills, & Dubno, 2007). The M100/N1 is thought to index signal detection, as increased confidence in the presence of a signal has been associated with shorter latency and higher amplitude responses (Hillyard & Kutas, 1983). Indeed, the M100/ N1 and subsequent M200/P2 reflect discernible changes in auditory intensity, with larger increases producing higher amplitude responses (Harris et al., 2007). The M100/N1 is also implicated in discrimination of auditory objects, as phonetic characteristics affect its latency and amplitude (Gage, Poeppel, Roberts, & Hickok, 1998). Attention affects the M100/N1 across a range of task demands, from basic alertness to orienting attention to early selective attention. Sleep attenuates the N1 amplitude by 25–50%, marking the earliest ERP event that reliably measures alertness (Tomé et al., 2015). Auditory oddball deviant stimuli enhance the amplitude and duration of the N1 (Neville & Foote, 1984; Tomé et al., 2015), even when a standard stimulus has not been established (Näätänen, Paavilainen, Rinne, & Alho, 2007; Näätänen & Picton, 1987). This may indicate automatic attentional capture by salient auditory stimuli (i.e., signal detection). During dichotic listening tasks, attended tones elicit larger amplitudes of the M100/N1 and subsequent P2 and N2 components than unattended tones (Woldorff et al., 1993; Woldorff & Hillyard, 1991). Thus, focusing attention on the relevant auditory channel enhances the N1 and accompanying responses. Finally, the N1 in response to broadband noise is robust when the sound is task‐relevant but virtually absent when it is task‐irrelevant (Chait et  al., 2004). This suggests that goal‐directed attention is necessary to elicit the N1, although evidence that the N1 occurs during passive listening qualifies this interpretation (for review, see Harris et al., 2007). It is possible that certain types of auditory stimuli are ignored unless they are task‐relevant (e.g., continuous broadband noise), whereas others are attended even in the absence of a task (e.g., changes in intensity or pitch). When auditory stimuli are attended and task‐relevant, the initial N1‐P2 cortical response is followed by the P3, which is thought to reflect endogenous cognitive processes rather than sensory characteristics (Hillyard & Kutas, 1983). This positive‐going waveform peaks in the 250–600 ms range (Dreo, Attia, Pirtosek, & Repovs, 2017) and appears to originate from the temporoparietal junction (Knight, Scabini, Woods, & Clayworth, 1989) and lateral frontal cortex (Justen & Herbert, 2018). The P3 may index late, meaning‐based attentional selection (Hillyard & Kutas, 1983). In dichotic listening paradigms, attention enhances the P3 in response to stimuli requiring a response, but not to non‐target stimuli (Donald & Little, 1981). It is also produced by violations of stimulus expectations in auditory oddball tasks, even when deviance is marked by stimulus absence or intensity reductions (Donald & Little, 1981). P3 amplitudes are larger when participants are asked to identify deviant stimuli, compared to passive listening conditions (Justen & Herbert, 2018). Thus, the P3 component is influenced by goal‐directed attention and may indicate updating of internal sensory memory representations (Dreo et al., 2017). The ERP components discussed so far are elicited by most types of auditory stimulation. In contrast, the N400 and P600 components are produced in response to words (but cf. Gallagher

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et al., 2014; Lelekov‐Boissard & Dominey, 2002) and are influenced by preceding semantic or structural context. The N400 is elicited during sentence or discourse processing by words that are semantically unexpected (Hagoort, 2008; Kutas & Hillyard, 1980a, 1980b, 1983, 1984). The degree of contextual incongruity modulates this effect: the N400 is virtually absent for expected words, modest for semantically‐related words that are unexpected, and large for words that are completely unrelated to the context (Kutas & Hillyard, 1980b, 1984). The semantic association between word pairs also modulates N400 amplitude, but only for tasks that require some degree of semantic processing (Bentin, Kutas, & Hillyard, 1993, 1995). Therefore, the N400 may indicate the active process of predicting (Chow, Momma, Smith, Lau, & Phillips, 2016) or making sense of words in context (Hagoort, 2008). The P600 is a long‐lasting positive‐going deflection beginning about 500 ms after words that violate syntactic rules, independently of the semantic context effect (Hagoort, 2008). Though first reported in response to overt grammatical errors (Hagoort, Brown, & Groothusen, 1993; Osterhout & Holcomb, 1992, 1993), it also emerges for syntactic structures that are grammatically correct but complex, uncommon, or temporarily ambiguous (Hagoort, 2008). Thus, the P600 signifies incompatibility between the currently assigned syntactic structure and other possible interpretations, and may be related to re‐evaluation processes. Syntactic violations can lead to later semantic processing difficulties, marked by increased N400s for words following a grammatical error (Hagoort et al., 1993). In contrast, syntactic errors produce P600s for coherent and nonsensical contexts alike (Hagoort, 2008). The extent to which syntactic and semantic processing occur in parallel and interactively versus sequentially and independently is still actively debated (Chow, Lau, Wang, & Phillips, 2018; Stroud & Phillips, 2012). Although the N400 and P600 were initially reported for reading tasks, they are also observed during listening (Bentin et al., 1993, 1995; Hagoort, 2008; Osterhout & Holcomb, 1993). This modality‐independence suggests that the N400 and P600 denote high‐level linguistic processes rather than early sensory processing tied to auditory or visual input. However, the exact timing and topographical distribution of these components depends on input modality. Specifically, the N400 for spoken language is preceded by an earlier N200 peak and is more left‐lateralized than for written language (Hagoort, 2008). The auditory‐specific N200 may be due to incremental phonological processing: detection of an unexpected phoneme at word onset can invalidate a lexical prediction prior to full word recognition (Hagoort, 2008). Although the N400 and P600 reflect abstract linguistic processes, different processing demands of reading versus listening may subtly affect these components.

Phase Coherence Measures of Listening Activity across neuronal populations naturally oscillates, resulting in cyclic fluctuations of the EEG signal that indicate local or inter‐network temporal coordination of neurons (Weisz & Obleser, 2014). Auditory researchers typically examine power in the delta (1–3 Hz), theta (4–8 Hz), alpha (approximately 10 Hz), or gamma bands (25–35 Hz), each reflecting different functional domains (Giraud & Poeppel, 2012). The alpha rhythm has a special status, as cyclic activity at 10 Hz is evident in the raw EEG signal and predominates the signal at rest (Weisz & Obleser, 2014). Alpha power in task‐­ relevant brain regions typically decreases during task execution (Weisz & Obleser, 2014). Researchers believe that alpha power corresponds to the balance of excitatory and inhibitory activity, which shifts with changes in goal‐directed attention (Weisz & Obleser, 2014). Across individuals, alpha oscillations vary in their precise frequency and their phase locking consistency, an index of stimulus‐oscillation coupling that is related to neural synchrony (Harris & Dubno, 2017). Harris and Dubno (2017) reported that older adults exhibit decreased peak



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alpha frequency at rest and reduced phase locking values in response to brief gaps in broadband noise, corresponding to poorer gap detection. Thus, the alpha rhythm can assess individual differences in the sensitivity and processing speed of the auditory system. Gamma, theta, and delta oscillations may be particularly relevant for speech processing. While these oscillations occur in the absence of input, speech input may reset the endogenous rhythm in auditory cortex, such that theta cycles align with syllabic modulation of the speech envelope while gamma tracks neuronal spiking during the active theta phase (Giraud & Poeppel, 2012). Speech information is then processed with maximal efficiency because it arrives when neurons are in their active state. Speech becomes considerably less intelligible, however, when the manipulation of spectral or temporal information causes the envelope to fall out‐of‐alignment with theta and gamma rhythms (Giraud & Poeppel, 2012). Interestingly, neural oscillations reliably track non‐speech stimuli only when their segmentation rates are similar to temporal elements of speech (Luo & Poeppel, 2012). Therefore, our intrinsic neural rhythms may be tuned to the natural temporal structure of speech. Recent research demonstrates that neural oscillations indeed become time‐locked to the speech signal, a phenomenon known as neural entrainment (Ding & Simon, 2014). Gamma activity measured from posterior superior temporal gyrus was highly correlated with the speech envelope over time (Kubanek, Brunner, Gunduz, Poeppel, & Schalk, 2013). Cortical entrainment to speech occurs across different abstract linguistic levels to track syllables, phrases, and sentences (Ding, Melloni, Zhang, Tian, & Poeppel, 2016). This is not an artifact of acoustics, as tracking of phrases and sentences disappears when speech syllables are not meaningful (Ding et al., 2016). Such neural entrainment may explain how humans are able to segregate speech from a noisy environment. Indeed, neural tracking of the speech envelope occurs even in the presence of background noise, and individuals with a higher degree of entrainment have better speech recognition (Ding, Chatterjee, & Simon, 2014). Taken together, the evidence suggests that neural entrainment reflects the successful extraction of speech from the auditory scene and encoding/analysis of hierarchical linguistic structures.

Pupillometry Approaches to Listening Neuroimaging methods have provided critical insight into the mechanisms that underlie speech understanding in ideal and in adverse listening conditions. There are, however, several practical limitations on their use. While some EEG measures, like the auditory brainstem response, are used clinically, many neuroimaging techniques are limited to well‐funded research centers. They are expensive to operate and typically require computationally‐intensive, advanced analytical tools. Safety and data quality concerns also limit applicability to certain populations. MEG studies are generally not conducted on individuals with cochlear implants because the devices generate electromagnetic interference that distorts MEG signals (cf. Johnson, Tesan, & Crain, 2012). fMRI cannot safely be conducted on individuals with implanted metal or electronic devices. Many neuroimaging methods also require that participants stay still or avoid blinking during data collection, which may preclude the study of young children, individuals with mobility issues, or individuals with attentional deficits. Physiological measures, such as pupillometry, electrodermal skin conductance, and heart rate variability, also have been successfully used to track changes in the mental demands associated with listening (McGarrigle et al., 2014). These measures are largely driven by changes in the autonomic nervous system, often reflecting changes in the balance between sympathetic (“fight or flight”) and parasympathetic (“rest and digest”) activity. Such measures have less temporal and spatial resolution than M/EEG and fMRI, respectively, but still may provide insight into the mechanisms that contribute to listening effort. They are also less costly and can be applied to a wider range of populations than many imaging methods.

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Pupillometry Studies of Listening Pupillometry, which is a measure of pupil dilation over time, has been of particular interest in the study of listening effort. Much like EEG, pupillometry is collected continuously and may be time‐locked to task events of interest, such as the presentation of a word or sentence. This task‐evoked pupillary response (TEPR) is akin to an ERP. For relatively simple stimuli, like words, the TEPR exhibits a Gaussian‐shaped response that typically peaks 700–1500 ms after stimulus onset (Verney, Granholm, & Marshall, 2004). With longer, more complex stimuli like sentences, a slower to peak and more sustained response will be observed. Changes in pupil dilation are recorded with an eye tracker that shines an infrared light at the eye. The level of infrared light is similar to being outside on a sunny day and is both safe and imperceptible. Research‐grade eye trackers identify the pupil by fitting an ellipse to the darkest area of the image. A calibration procedure uses this information and the angle at which the light is reflected off the cornea to identify where people are looking and pupil size with ­millisecond to tens of millisecond resolution. Pupillometry in particular has been described as an index of the functioning of the locus coeruleus‐norepinephrine (LC‐NE) system that modulates states of attention (Gilzenrat, Nieuwenhuis, Jepma, & Cohen, 2010) in part via its innervation of regions in the CO network. Noradrenergic activity, driven by the firing of neurons in the locus coeruleus (LC) brainstem nucleus, alters the engagement of sensory‐ and attention‐related cortex (Aston‐Jones & Cohen, 2005). A slow, tonic pattern of LC firing drives baseline levels of arousal: too low activity is associated with inattention, and too high activity is associated with distractibility. A second pattern of activity is a rapid, phasic LC response that acts as a gain modulator that facilitates behavioral responses to a signal, particularly in the presence of ambiguity or noise, and is most readily observed at moderate levels of tonic activity. Baseline levels of dilation and the TEPR have been used to index these states, respectively (Gilzenrat et al., 2010). Although the LC and sympathetic/parasympathetic control of pupil dilation/constriction respectively are likely mediated by different subcortical and cortical structures (Wang & Munoz, 2015), work in animal models suggests a close relationship. For example, microstimulation of the LC has been shown to elicit a TEPR (Joshi, Li, Kalwani, & Gold, 2016). Published reviews have highlighted design considerations and major findings from pupillometry studies of speech and language processing (Schmidtke, 2018; Winn, Wendt, Koelewijn, & Kuchinsky, 2018; Zekveld, Koelewijn, & Kramer, 2018). We highlight a selection of findings from those papers as well as related work.

Design Considerations

Winn et al. (2018) and Schmidtke (2018) made recommendations for getting started with pupillometry to study effort in auditory and linguistic research. Design considerations include the length and complexity of the stimuli, which impact how quickly the pupil response returns to a pre‐stimulus baseline; this is critical when determining how far apart to space trials (cf. Wierda, van Rijn, Taatgen, & Martens, 2012). Potential sources of artifacts to consider include changes in screen luminance, eye movements, and age‐related reductions in the dynamic range of the pupillary response (Piquado, Isaacowitz, & Wingfield, 2010). Preprocessing and analysis of pupillometry data require examining the time series for quality and filtering noise from the signal. Blinks and large eye movements that mask or distort the size of the pupil must be removed. Analysis techniques will depend on the research question. Many studies employ peak‐picking in which the maximum pupil dilation following stimulus onset is recorded with its associated latency. Other approaches include characterizing how task demands impact various aspects of the shape of the pupil response function (e.g., van Rij, Hendricks, van Rijn, Baayen, & Wood, 2019).



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Critical to the study of listening effort, pupillometry reveals information about processing beyond speech recognition accuracy scores. The relationship between task performance and effort appears to be nonlinear. Like functional CO activity, pupil dilation is maximal at moderate levels of task difficulty when individuals are likely to apply the most cognitive effort to a task; as the task becomes either easier or impossibly hard, pupil dilation decreases (Ayasse & Wingfield, 2018; Ohlenforst et al., 2017).

Key Findings

Early studies of pupillometry noted that pupil dilation appears to index “the amount of material which is under active processing at any time” (Kahneman & Beatty, 1966, p. 1583). Acoustic factors that contribute to listening‐related effort were not systematically examined until decades later. Kramer, Kapteyn, Festen, and Kuik (1997) observed that dilation decreased in more advantageous signal‐to‐noise ratios (SNRs), but that this “release from effort” was smaller in hearing impaired individuals. Effort is thus impacted by task demands and the capacity resources of the listener. There has since been a dramatic increase in publications using pupillometry to study listening effort (see Zekveld et al., 2018 for a review). In general, the pupillary response is larger and slower to peak in more challenging acoustic conditions, such as with poorer SNRs (Zekveld, Kramer, & Festen, 2010) and greater signal degradation (Winn, Edwards, & Litovsky, 2015). The TEPR may also be impacted by individual differences in auditory and cognitive abilities (Zekveld, Kramer, & Festen, 2011). These patterns occur even when speech recognition performance is very high or consistent across conditions. Linguistic demands also systematically affect pupillary measures of listening effort (see Schmidtke, 2018 for a review), including phonological (López‐Ornat, Karousou, Gallego, Martín, & Camero, 2018) and syntactic complexity (Piquado et  al., 2010) and demands related to pragmatic inference generation (Tromp, Hagoort, & Meyer, 2016). Several studies have observed interactions between acoustic and lexical, syntactic, or semantic demands. For example, the TEPR in older adults has been observed to be most sustained in a challenging SNR when response options included a lexical competitor for the target word (Kuchinsky et al., 2013). Wendt, Dau, and Hjortkjær (2016) observed a small but significant interaction between level of background noise and syntactic complexity on dilation in younger adults. Lack of semantic context also has been associated with a slower pupil response, especially for people listening to spectrally degraded sentences (Winn, 2016). Increases in task load on domain‐general cognitive systems also appear to impact listening‐ related effort. For example, the pupil response varies with the strength of a memory trace during an auditory recognition memory task (Otero, Weekes, & Hutton, 2011). Other studies have observed a larger and/or slower pupil response as participants recall items in an auditory digit‐span task (e.g., Piquado et  al., 2010), until one’s memory capacity is overloaded and pupil size asymptotes or decreases (Cabestrero, Crespo, & Quirós, 2009). Attentional demands on auditorily‐presented stimuli also have been shown to impact pupil size. The TEPR is larger when participants attend to speech in one ear while ignoring the other, particularly when the location of the target speech is not cued (Koelewijn, de Kluiver, Shinn‐Cunningham, Zekveld, & Kramer, 2015). Furthermore, cognitive and acoustic challenges appear to interact: when memory load potentially exceeds one’s capacity, typical effects of SNR on the TEPR may be obscured (Zekveld, Kramer, Rönnberg, & Rudner, 2019).

Relationship to Neural Measures of Listening Although pupillometry has practical advantages, it provides more limited mechanistic insight into the systems that underlie effortful listening compared to fMRI and M/EEG.

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Thus, studies have aimed to link pupillary and neuroimaging indices of effort within ­individuals and experimental trials. Much of this work has been conducted with EEG, in part because electrophysiological studies of LC function in animals have informed predictions about the relationship between the pupil response and associated neural mechanisms (Aston‐Jones & Cohen, 2005). In support of the pupil response indexing LC function in humans, baseline pupil diameter has been observed to exhibit an inverted U‐shaped relationship to the attention‐driven P3 ERP and performance in an auditory oddball task (Murphy, Robertson, Balsters, & O’Connell, 2011). Performance and P3 amplitude were maximal when baseline dilation was intermediate, in line with expected patterns of tonic LC activity. Furthermore, larger TEPRs were associated with greater task challenge (during periods of poorer performance), in line with predictions for phasic LC activity. EEG spectral power is also associated with pupil dilation during listening. Decreases in alpha power and pupil size have been observed with more advantageous SNRs (McMahon et al., 2016). However, when a vocoding distortion was used to reduce stimulus intelligibility (6 vs. 16 channel), SNR no longer affected these measures, suggesting that different acoustic manipulations affect the extent to which pupillometry and EEG track the same processes. Other studies have failed to find correlations between individual differences in alpha and pupillary measures in some listening conditions (Miles et al., 2017). Furthermore, a study that collected alpha‐power EEG, pupillary, skin conductance, and self‐reports of listening effort observed inconsistent relationships across these measures (Alhanbali, Dawes, Millman, & Munro, 2019). Substantial work is thus needed to understand the extent to which pupillometry (and other measures) directly track the neural systems that contribute to effortful listening. One of the few studies linking pupillometry to fMRI activity during listening found that a larger pupil response was associated with greater activity in bilateral superior temporal gyrus and the left anterior insula, a region of the CO network (Zekveld, Heslenfeld, Johnsrude, Versfeld, & Kramer, 2014). Because the LC‐NE (locus coeruleus‐norepinephrine) is a neuromodulatory system with widespread projections throughout cortex, it is unclear whether changes in pupil dilation track neural changes within a particular region or network or whether dilation represents a summary measure of activity across the brain (Winn et al., 2018). Future work must validate the extent to which the pupillary response, or its components (e.g., peak amplitude, latency), track neural systems engaged during effortful listening. In this way, pupillometry may provide greater insight into the mechanisms that contribute to individuals’ complaints of speech recognition difficulties and guide the development of remediations that target those issues. Although an objective measure of listening effort would be of clinical benefit, pupillometry is still primarily a research tool. Effort‐related differences are commonly assessed at the group level. However, substantial inter‐individual, inter‐session (e.g., day‐to‐day changes in arousal and motivation), and inter‐trial variability remain. Thus, the utility of pupillometry for clinical diagnosis of listening effort has yet to be established (Winn et al., 2018). Even so, pupillometry has been useful for examining changes in effort with aging, hearing loss, cognitive capacity, and following intervention within laboratory settings (Kuchinsky et al., 2014). Advancements in sensor technology and reductions in cost mean that it is becoming easier to unobtrusively collect physiological data through smart devices. A large‐scale study conducted with such tools could allow researchers to develop diagnostic norms for evaluating effort in clinical settings.

Conclusion Physiological approaches to listening research have provided critical insight into the mechanisms that support successful communication. This chapter has reviewed evidence of how these methods work and how they have been used to study listening in optimal conditions



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and in the presence of acoustic, linguistic, and cognitive challenges. While fMRI studies have been most informative about which brain regions and networks are engaged during listening, M/EEG have revealed key information about the temporal unfolding of listening‐related activity. Pupillometry appears to index the mental effort associated with listening across a range of conditions and populations, though more research is needed to link pupil metrics to the specific neural mechanisms engaged during listening. Most physiological measures have not been validated for diagnostic use or as outcome measures in ecologically‐important contexts, such as the audiology clinic. No single measure of hearing, attention, or brain activation is likely to provide a complete understanding of the mechanisms that contribute to effective listening. Behavioral, self‐report, physiological, neural, and other measures all have a role to play in characterizing the problems that listeners face and identifying how to best remediate those challenges.

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Peelle, J. E. (2018). Listening effort. Ear and Hearing, 39, 204–214. https://doi.org/10.1097/ AUD.0000000000000494 Peelle, J. E., Eason, R. J., Schmitter, S., Schwarzbauer, C., & Davis, M. H. (2010). Evaluating an acoustically quiet EPI sequence for use in fMRI studies of speech and auditory processing. NeuroImage, 52, 1410–1419. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.05.015 Peelle, J. E., Troiani, V., Wingfield, A., & Grossman, M. (2010). Neural processing during older adults’ comprehension of spoken sentences: Age differences in resource allocation and connectivity. Cerebral Cortex, 20, 773–782. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhp142 Picton, T. W., Taylor, M. J., & Durieux‐Smith, A. (2005). Brainstem auditory evoked potentials in infants and children. In M. J. Aminoff (Ed.), Electrodiagnosis in clinical neurology (5th ed., pp. 525–552). New York: Saunders. Piquado, T., Isaacowitz, D., & Wingfield, A. (2010). Pupillometry as a measure of cognitive effort in younger and older adults. Psychophysiology, 47, 560–569. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469‐8986.2009.00947.x Rogers, C. S., & Peelle, J. E. (2019). Interactions between audition and cognition in hearing loss and aging. In L. L. Holt & A. J. Lotto (Eds.), The auditory cognitive neuroscience of speech perception. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Schmidtke, J. (2018). Pupillometry in linguistic research. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 40, 529–549. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263117000195 Schmitter, S., Diesch, E., Amann, M., Kroll, A., Moayer, M., & Schad, L. R. (2008). Silent echo‐planar imaging for auditory FMRI. Magnetic Resonance Materials in Physics, Biology, and Medicine, 21, 317–325. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10334‐008‐0132‐4 Schwarzbauer, C., Davis, M. H., Rodd, J. M., & Johnsrude, I. (2006). Interleaved silent steady state (ISSS) imaging: A new sparse imaging method applied to auditory fMRI. NeuroImage, 29, 774– 782. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2005.08.025 Stroud, C., & Phillips, C. (2012). Examining the evidence for an independent semantic analyzer: An ERP study in Spanish. Brain and Language, 120, 108–126. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. bandl.2011.02.001 Talavage, T. M., Gonzalez‐Castillo, J., & Scott, S. K. (2014). Auditory neuroimaging with fMRI and PET. Hearing Research, 307, 4–15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heares.2013.09.009 Talavage, T. M., Sereno, M. I., Melcher, J. R., Ledden, P. J., Rosen, B. R., & Dale, A. M. (2004). Tonotopic organization in human auditory cortex revealed by progressions of frequency sensitivity. Journal of Neurophysiology, 91, 1282–1296. https://doi.org/10.1152/jn.01125.2002 Teubner‐Rhodes, S., Vaden, K. I., Jr., Dubno, J. R., & Eckert, M. A. (2017). Cognitive persistence: Development and validation of a novel measure from the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. Neuropsychologia, 102, 95–108. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.05.027 Tomé, D., Barbosa, F., Nowak, K., & Marques‐Teixeira, J. (2015). The development of the N1 and N2 components in auditory oddball paradigms: A systematic review with narrative analysis and suggested normative values. Journal of Neural Transmission, 122, 375–391. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s00702‐014‐1258‐3 Tromp, J., Hagoort, P., & Meyer, A. S. (2016). Pupillometry reveals increased pupil size during indirect request comprehension. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69, 1093–1108. https://doi. org/10.1080/17470218.2015.1065282 Vaden, K. I., Jr., Kuchinsky, S. E., Ahlstrom, J. B., Dubno, J. R., & Eckert, M. A. (2015). Cortical activity predicts which older adults recognize speech in noise and when. Journal of Neuroscience, 35, 3929–3937. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2908‐14.2015 Vaden, K. I., Jr., Kuchinsky, S. E., Ahlstrom, J. B., Teubner‐Rhodes, S. E., Dubno, J. R., & Eckert, M. A. (2016). Cingulo‐opercular function during word recognition in noise for older adults with hearing loss. Experimental Aging Research, 42, 67–82. https://doi.org/10.1080/03610 73X.2016.1108784 van Rij, J., Hendriks, P., van Rijn, H., Baayen, R. H., & Wood, S. N. (2019). Analyzing the time course of pupillometric data. Trends in Hearing, 23, 2331216519832483. https://doi. org/10.1177/2331216519832483 Verney, S. P., Granholm, E., & Marshall, S. P. (2004). Pupillary responses on the visual backward masking task reflect general cognitive ability. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 52, 23–36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2003.12.003

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Wang, C. A., & Munoz, D. P. (2015). A circuit for pupil orienting responses: Implications for cognitive modulation of pupil size. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 33, 134–140. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.conb.2015.03.018 Wendt, D., Dau, T., & Hjortkjær, J. (2016). Impact of background noise and sentence complexity on processing demands during sentence comprehension. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 345. https://doi. org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00345 Wierda, S. M., van Rijn, H., Taatgen, N. A., & Martens, S. (2012). Pupil dilation deconvolution reveals the dynamics of attention at high temporal resolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109, 8456–8460. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1201858109 Winn, M. (2016). Rapid release from listening effort resulting from semantic context, and effects of spectral degradation and cochlear implants. Trends in Hearing, 20, 2331216516669723. https:// doi.org/10.1177/2331216516669723 Winn, M. B., Edwards, J. R., & Litovsky, R. Y. (2015). The impact of auditory spectral resolution on listening effort revealed by pupil dilation. Ear and Hearing, 36, e153–e165. https://doi. org/10.1097/AUD.0000000000000145 Winn, M. B., Wendt, D., Koelewijn, T., & Kuchinsky, S. E. (2018). Best practices and advice for using pupillometry to measure listening effort: An introduction for those who want to get started. Trends in Hearing, 22, 2331216518800869. https://doi.org/10.1177/2331216518800869 Weisz, N., & Obleser, J. (2014). Synchronisation signatures in the listening brain: A perspective from non‐invasive neuroelectrophysiology. Hearing Research, 307, 16–28. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. heares.2013.07.009 Woldorff, M. G., Gallen, C. C., Hampson, S. A., Hillyard, S. A., Pantev, C., Sobel, D., & Bloom, F. E. (1993). Modulation of early sensory processing in human auditory cortex during auditory selective attention. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 90, 8722–8726. https://doi. org/10.1073/pnas.90.18.8722 Woldorff, M. G., & Hillyard, S. A. (1991). Modulation of early auditory processing during selective listening to rapidly presented tones. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 79, 170–191. https://doi.org/10.1016/0013‐4694(91)90136‐r Zekveld, A. A., Heslenfeld, D. J., Festen, J. M., & Schoonhoven, R. (2006). Top‐down and bottom‐up processes in speech comprehension. NeuroImage, 32, 1826–1836. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. neuroimage.2006.04.199 Zekveld, A. A., Heslenfeld, D. J., Johnsrude, I. S., Versfeld, N. J., & Kramer, S. E. (2014). The eye as a window to the listening brain: Neural correlates of pupil size as a measure of cognitive listening load. NeuroImage, 101, 76–86. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2014.06.069 Zekveld, A. A., Koelewijn, T., & Kramer, S. E. (2018). The pupil dilation response to auditory stimuli: Current state of knowledge. Trends in Hearing, 22, 2331216518777174. https://doi. org/10.1177/2331216518777174 Zekveld, A. A., Kramer, S. E., & Festen, J. M. (2010). Pupil response as an indication of effortful listening: The influence of sentence intelligibility. Ear and Hearing, 31, 480–490. https://doi. org/10.1097/AUD.0b013e3181d4f251 Zekveld, A. A., Kramer, S. E. E., & Festen, J. M. M. (2011). Cognitive load during speech perception in noise: The influence of age, hearing loss, and cognition on the pupil response. Ear and Hearing, 32, 498–510. https://doi.org/10.1097/AUD.0b013e31820512bb Zekveld, A. A., Kramer, S. E., Rönnberg, J., & Rudner, M. (2019). In a concurrent memory and auditory perception task, the pupil dilation response is more sensitive to memory load than to auditory stimulus characteristics. Ear and Hearing, 40, 272–286. https://doi.org/10.1097/ AUD.0000000000000612

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Phenomenological Approaches Lisbeth A. Lipari

What is phenomenology? Like many questions, the answer depends on both who you ask and how you listen. Although it is widely agreed that phenomenology is a branch of philosophy that studies the human experience of things in the world, there are wide disagreements as to the emphases, scope, and practice of phenomenology. Brought into focus in the early twentieth century, first by Husserl and then shortly after by Heidegger, Merleau‐Ponty, Sartre, and many others; phenomenology has become increasingly useful to scholars of listening. In this chapter, I provide a brief introduction to phenomenology and examine how it is employed to understand listening. Specifically, I examine its contributions to the study of acoustics and the materiality of sound, embodiment and music, and lastly, language and communication.

Introduction to Phenomenology Originally, Husserl understood phenomenology to be closely connected to the study of logic, wherein phenomenologists aimed to give descriptive scientific accounts of phenomena as they appeared in consciousness – descriptions of the essence of thinking and knowing objects in the world. In his first work, Logical Investigations, Husserl (2001) described how even though a phenomenological account could not be understood as the “home ground of pure logic, it was nevertheless indispensable to the advance of purely logical research” (p. 167). To this end, Husserl wrote that phenomenologists could not simply rely on “mere words” or everyday symbolic understandings in their research, but “must go back to the things ‘themselves’” (p. 168). Phenomenology was thus not about explaining or analyzing experience, but about describing its essence. Husserl employed the concept of intentionality to describe the agency of consciousness that went “back” to the essence of the thing – that consciousness is always consciousness of or about something. But because human perceptions are always freighted with taken for granted, unseen, and/or unheard presuppositions, Husserl used a concept he called reduction to describe how phenomenologists must limit pre‐existing ideas and ­understandings from intruding into the phenomenological description. To achieve this, the phenomenologist must first approach experiences with the wonderment of “a perpetual beginner,” and secondly, must grapple with “the impossibility of a complete reduction”

The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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(Merleau‐Ponty, 1969, p. 35). That is to say, the phenomenologist must vigorously strive toward reduction, all the while aware that no reduction will ever be complete. In Heidegger’s (1988) extension of and departure from his teacher Husserl’s phenomenology, which he considered to be “the scientific procedure of philosophy” (p. 23), Heidegger replaced Husserl’s emphasis on logic and rational thought as the seat of phenomenological knowing with an emphasis on the experience of being itself – the being of beings – and their actions in the world (Heidegger, 1962). To Heidegger, the experience of knowing a hammer, for example, was not conveyed through a mental image or verbal description of the hammer, but in the body’s knowledge of using a hammer – of its innate heft and balance, of the force needed to make it swing, of the sensation of the hammer against a nail, and so forth. In Heidegger’s view, what Husserl described as intentionality was better understood as comportment, “of being‐directed‐ toward” (Heidegger, 1988, p. 58). This enabled Heidegger to move phenomenology away from the study of pure consciousness as a strictly mental activity into the realm of interactions between being and world. Deeply influenced by Husserl and Heidegger, the French philosopher Merleau‐Ponty (1962) brought phenomenology even more deeply into the physiological embodiment of human experience. As with Heidegger, Merleau‐Ponty rejected the Cartesian duality of ­subject and object and understood human experience not as a matter of separate subjects encountering separate objects, but as a relationship between phenomena. He wrote: Experience of one’s own body runs counter to the reflective procedure which detaches subject and object from each other, and which gives us only the thought about the body, or the body as an idea, and not the experience of the body or the body in reality. (1962, p. 231)

To Merleau‐Ponty, an encounter with a fireplace, for example, is an: experience of a bodily presence. I become involved in things with my body, they co‐exist with me as an incarnate subject, and this life among things has nothing in common with the elaboration of scientifically conceived objects. (1962, p. 215)

Thus, phenomenology’s “task was to reveal the mystery of the world” (Merleau‐Ponty, 1969, p. 43). Today, phenomenology is practiced in a variety of ways across a range of disciplines and fields, such as consciousness studies, theory of mind, logic and mathematics, communication, education, nursing and medicine, and particle physics. Smith (2018) provided a working ­definition of phenomenology from a philosophical perspective of today: “the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first‐person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object” (p. 1). Lucid and authoritative as this definition may be, however, it can pose problems for some scholars of listening because of the entailments embedded in the ideas of structure, view, intentionality, and objects. The reason is that each of these terms (some as metaphors and some as simple nouns), imposes an a priori framework that presupposes perspectives and concepts that may not be entirely commensurate with particular qualities of listening. The idea of structure, for example, seems to posit a stable spatial conception of phenomena that can preclude an understanding of listening as a temporal process that unfolds and changes through time. Similarly, the idea of view, tends to impose a visual bias that renders some aspects of listening as, frankly, inaudible. Smith (1967), for example, critiqued the visual dominance of most p ­ henomenology by arguing that “It is only from [this] full bodily spectrum that a complete phenomenology is possible. This cannot be done by making sight stand for all the senses… Hearing and touch cannot properly be adjudged from the standard



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of how a thing looks” (Smith 1967, p. 190). Similarly, the idea of intentionality can also pose ­problems for questions about listening involving unconscious perceptions or overheard, misheard, or misunderstood utterances. Lastly, the assertion of listening objects as differentiated from subjects raises the aforementioned problem of Cartesian dualism and the realization that “our existence is too tightly held in the world to be able to know itself as such at the moment of its involvement” (Merleau‐Ponty, 1969, p. 36). Each of the above four concepts (structure, view, intentionality, objects) generate potential tensions between listening and phenomenology that I will touch upon as we encounter listening across a range of acoustic, musical, and linguistic communication phenomena. We will begin with the area of acoustics and the materiality of sound, examining how subject‐, object‐, and non‐dual‐orientations to phenomenology of listening have been explored, centering on this question: Does phenomenology focus on acoustical objects, phenomena and sound, on cognition and the processes of listening, or on some non‐dual conception of both?

Acoustics and the Materiality of Sound The old philosophical chestnut that asks, “If a tree falls in the forest, but there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?” introduces a central paradox in the definition of sound – for the answer depends both on how you define sound and how you define “no one.” If only hearing humans count as “one,” then perhaps the tree falls without a sound. But if we define sound as a physical process that involves the transfer of energy in the form of pressure waves, then yes indeed the falling tree makes sound (although of course it also raises an entirely new question about the difference between sound and noise). In English, the widely understood definition of sound is provided by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the sensation produced in the organs of hearing when the surrounding air is set in vibration in such a way as to affect these….” (Sound, n.d.). But even this definition, too, leaves unanswered the question of whether sound can be defined apart from its detection by “organs of hearing.” From a mechanical perspective, sound waves are defined as the energy patterns created when objects collide with enough force to compress the atomic particles together. When the particles move from their pre‐ to their post‐collision state, they transfer the energy of the original movement to nearby particles which in turn transfer the energy to the next and so on, creating a wave pattern that spreads out from the source of the initial collision, not unlike the patterned undulations of a Slinky toy. When you strike the head of a drum with a stick, the pressure from that collision creates vibrations that travel as waves through the drum down to the floor and beyond, as well as through the stick into your hand and up your arm, and through the air to the walls, windows, and doors, travelling through any material (such as bone, wood, glass, water, or air) in its path. The reason we call it a wave is because particles moving in one direction leave a gully‐like gap behind them. As the wave moves, each gap in the pattern is filled with the particles moving forward from behind, producing a repeating cycle of compression and release. Sound waves move longitudinally in the same direction they travel, like an earthworm scrunching up and then stretching out. But unlike the muscles of an earthworm, sound waves can travel through any medium. The speed of a sound wave (the number of cycles per second) is called frequency, and in the west, we associate rapid frequency with “high” pitch and slow frequency with “low” pitch. But not all cultures map pitch with height metaphors. In some cultures, such a Bali and Java, musicians use the metaphor of size (small and large) instead of high and low, whereas in the Amazon, some cultures use metaphors of young and old (Brower, 2008). But regardless of what metaphors we use, what is remarkable about all this is the fact that the ear can distinguish

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incredibly precise differences in pitch as well as rhythm. According to the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz (1885): it is well known that when two pendulums are ticking near one another, the ear can distinguish whether the ticks are or are not coincident, within one hundredth of a second. The eye would certainly fail to determine whether two flashes of light coincided within 1/24th of a second; and probably within a much larger fraction of a second. (p. 173)

This sensitivity to pitch is what enables us to perceive when things are out of tune, even by the slightest fraction. Studies of acoustics tend to focus on sound as “the object” of human listening and often involve questions about the relation between sound and the materiality of the surrounding environment, such as architectural design, density and texture of materials, and the size and shape of objects in the area. Daniel Kish, president of the World Access for the Blind foundation, has trained himself to “see” through experiencing the relation between sound and environment. Mr. Kish’s foundation teaches blind and low‐vision people from all over the world how to navigate through space using echolocation, or what he prefers to call “FlashSonar.” By producing tongue clicks that bounce off objects in the surrounding environment, FlashSonar yields information about the size, shape, location, distance, and solidity of things in the near to middle distance. Kish and his colleagues teach students three different kinds of tongue clicks  –  “cluck click,” “giddy up click,” and the very soft “tsk tsk click,” which, while barely noticeable by sighted people, yields an extraordinary amount of information about everything from walls, open windows, and doorways to pedestrians, trees, and parked or moving vehicles. Acoustics and environment also interact in ways that influence the human experience of sound. Blesser and Salter (2007) examined how technological innovations – such as recording technologies and architectural design – have changed human experience of sound, noting that “With repeated exposure, sensory expectations adjust to what is familiar. Dry acoustics and weak beer both become matters of habit and custom” (p. 112). Similarly, Bijsterveld (2003) chronicled the historical development of noise abatement campaigns in Europe and America in the early part of the twentieth century. Notably, the meanings attributed to sound and noise were shaped both by technological change as well as by cultural values related to class and gender (see also Van Lengen, this volume). As will be described, many acoustical phenomenologists, such as Bregman, Ihde, O’Callahan, Schaeffer, and Schafer, attempt to listen beyond meaning to the quality and character of sound itself, without intrusions posed by mental formations about meaning. One of the earliest phenomenological philosophers of sound and voice is Don Ihde (1976), who introduced the idea of listening phenomenologically and investigated the experience of sound and listening that lay beyond the ideas and associations we bring to that listening. His phenomenological explorations examine listening in relation to auditory fields and dimensions, imagination and music, and silence and word. Murray Schafer is another early advocate of an experiential approach to listening phenomenologically. In his highly influential Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (1977/1994), Schafer not only developed a glossary of numerous concepts for studying soundscapes as well as a system of sound notation, he also developed an array of exercises designed to help students of sound studies “clean their ears” and attune to the sounds of the world. O’Callaghan, a more recent sound theorist, is constructing a phenomenological theory of sounds despite the fact that the question of “how to distinguish sensory perception from occurrent thought and other varieties of cognition is a vexed problem, and no uncontroversial criterion exhaustively sorts mental episodes into sensory perceptions and thoughts or extra‐perceptual cognitions” (2011, p. 788). He defined sounds as events “that possess audible qualities of pitch, timber,



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and loudness, perhaps along with other audible and inaudible properties” (O’Callaghan, 2017, p. 5). Like Bregman, O’Callaghan (2017) described auditory perception as a process of discerning elements of sonic information, which he defined as “public objects of auditory perception” (p. 9). In my experience, students express astonishment when working with these ideas. They have a newfound awareness of daily sonic experiences – walking across campus in and out of different buildings, quadrangles, parks, and parking lots, wildlife (insects, birds, trees whispering), machinery, the voices of others, as well as the percussive sounds of footsteps in the stairwells and across the floor. They are surprised at how loud a car sounds driving through an underground garage, and then they notice the Doppler effect, where the sound of a moving object (in this case a vehicle) lowers in pitch as it passes by. Following Schafer’s and Ihde’s prompting, we attempt to listen beyond words and meanings to the sounds and sensations of the world around us. We try to observe which sounds we notice and which we ignore, and we strive to pay careful attention to the sounds we might otherwise avoid or disregard. In the early part of the semester, I play different sounds from the BBC sound effects library in class and ask students to pay attention to how they physically, not mentally or emotionally, respond to these sounds. Students report, among other sensations, clenching their teeth, tightening their stomachs, relaxing their shoulders, and feeling a tingling in their hair, in response to sounds that range from the comforting lapping of waves on a beach to the agonizing wails of a child crying in full tantrum mode.

Embodiment and Musicality The field of music has been a rich area for philosophers and musicians to develop a phenomenology of listening that emphasizes sound as sound rather than sound as meaning (see Brounley, this volume). As the phenomenological philosopher of listening, Don Ihde described, “in all music, sound draws attention to itself” (1976, p. 158). Perhaps one of the first contemporary Western scholars to conduct a phenomenology of listening to the musicality of sound was the German scholar Günther Wille. In 1958, Wille resurrected the ancient Greek term akroasis (from the Greek for “hearing,” ακρόασις) to examine the ways in which “the sense of hearing is a key feature of being, disclosing the inner and outer realms” (Lindenlauf, 2005, p. 1). By using the transliterated Greek word akroasis, Wille drew attention to the ways in which, from a phenomenological perspective, studies of sound and music can never be parted entirely from the processes of listening. Wille traced akroasis through numerous ancient sources to describe a holistic perspective on hearing (based on a Pythagorean framework), which emphasized listening as inextricable from human being itself. Yet another scholar, Hans Kayser (1970), drew upon Pythagoras to write Akróasis: The Theory of World Harmonics, which articulated a general theory of correspondences between listening and sound. To an even greater extent than Wille, Kayser drew on the irreducible relationship between sound and listening by employing the term akroasis as the title of his manuscript. In his phenomenological exploration of listening, vibration, and the principles underlying the harmonic series, Kayser developed listening as a mode of thought quite distinct from what is offered by vision‐oriented cognition. As he described it, “anyone accustomed to thinking and feeling akroatically knows that there is no ‘objectivity’ in the sense of a world of facts detached from human beings” (p. 128). Kayser’s insight into the insufficiency of objects and objectivity brings us squarely to one of the central challenges of phenomenology discussed above: Husserl’s idea of the phenomenological reduction requires the phenomenologist to be a perpetual beginner, striving to break from ordinary stances such as subjectivity and objectivity. As Merleau‐Ponty (1969) described it, “In order to see the world and grasp it as paradoxical, we must break with our familiar acceptance of it” (p. 35).

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Perhaps one of the first serious investigations into the compositional potential of sound as sound itself (rather than of sound as a form of meaning‐infused‐referentiality) was the French composer Pierre Schaeffer, whose 1948 musical composition, Etude aux Chemin de Fer, was based entirely on the manipulation of recorded railway sounds. In 1966, Schaeffer wrote Treatise on Musical Objects, which examined the physical properties of sound and their relation to music in an attempt to expand traditional Western musical vocabularies and break down culturally constructed barriers between sound, noise, and music. Schaeffer (2012) crafted an elaborate inventory of sonic and musical “planes of reference” to theorize what he called “concrete music,” an assemblage of recorded sounds “from the ski tow to the noise piano” that are combined, repeated, and manipulated into musical compositions. His compositions sought to avoid the constraints of Western tonality as well as the language of signs. For example, while Schaeffer admired the attempts of twelve‐tone serialist composers (also known as dodecaphonists) like Arnold Schoenberg to escape tonality, he decried their use of the twelve‐semitone division of the octave because it submitted to the governing order (centering on the interval between the tonic and the dominant fifth) that rules Western music. According to Schaeffer (2012), what underlies our appreciation of Western music is “not about pleasure, or beauty, or ugliness; rather, it is about a perfect conformity between man, who is sensitive to the dominant, and a music that exploits the phenomenon of the dominant” (p. 116). In contrast to Schaeffer’s attempted rupture of Western tonality, Brower (2008) assigned less cultural and more cognitive bases to the unconscious pattern matching that governs the Western tonic‐dominant relationship. In directing her inquiry to the relationship between the mind’s unconscious rendering of aural experience and the naturally occurring harmonic series, Brower (2008, p. 97) wrote: It has been found that the overtone series,  having been stored in memory through repeated exposure to the complex sounds of music and speech, serves as a template for pattern matching carried out at an unconscious level. It is here that we find the most likely explanation for our perception of the major triad as more stable than the minor:  its intervallic pattern forms a better match with the intervallic pattern of the overtone series.

Similarly, Albert Bregman (1994) developed an account of the experience of listening that he called “Auditory Scene Analysis” that examines how humans experience and organize sound as patterned perceptual units – how we group, segregate, and compare sounds, and how we build mental models of the world based on these groupings of sound. Bregman identified these patterns as auditory “streams” that we organize into coherent clumps of information in terms of both music and speech (see also Rost, Imhof, this volume). A more blended approach to the relation between sound and music has been taken by the American composer John Cage, who undertook a phenomenological investigation of listening to silence (see Clair, this volume). Written in 1952, his composition 4’33” invited the audience to listen carefully to silence without finding in it an “absence” of sound. The title describes the music: The conductor raises her baton, the orchestra members sit at attention with their instruments at the ready, and for four and a half minutes the orchestra members remain in place without playing a single note. Sitting in the music hall, the audience becomes aware of the sounds all around them, of people breathing or rustling around, of the shuffle of feet or the echo of a lonely cough, of the whisper of fabric against fabric, or the distant howling of a police siren. Another midcentury composer, Murray Schafer (mentioned above) advocated for a musical approach to listening outside the concert hall. Along with other influential composers such as Cage and Pauline Oliveros, Schafer was attuned to the way sounds themselves speak. Oliveros (2005), for example, cultivated a process she labeled “deep listening,” which involves “learning to expand the perception of sounds to include the whole space/time continuum of sound – encountering the vastness



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and complexities as much as possible” (2006, p. 481). Oliveros described how when she goes on stage, her performances are based on moment‐by‐moment improvisation that does not follow preconceived ideas but instead responds to a listening that includes everything in the auditory environment. Like Oliveros’s implicit participatory approach to sound (with audience and environment), the award winning Scottish percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie – who happens to be profoundly deaf – brings an embodied sensibility to listening. Glennie (1990) explained how, as listeners, we are in fact participators of sound because we actually touch the sound. After her deafness had been diagnosed at age 12, Glennie switched from piano to percussion. At the time, people thought her efforts to play music were pathetically futile, but with the support of her parents and teachers, she persisted. A major breakthrough came when her percussion teacher placed Glennie’s hand on the wall next to a big kettle drum and asked her to feel the vibrations on her palm as he struck the drum. As Glennie became increasingly sensitive to the vibrations, her teacher moved her into the hall entirely outside of the music room where he was pounding a kettle drum. By placing her hand on the wall outside the room, Glennie learned to differentiate between two pitches of the drum. Over time, she developed the  ability to distinguish the pitch and volume and rhythm of different instruments, including drums, marimba, and bells. Today Glennie is an internationally acclaimed percussionist who has mastered the ability to listen by touch. As she demonstrates in her live performances, as well as in her film “Touch the Sound” (Riedelsheimer, 2004), and in her 2008 TED Talk entitled, “How to Listen”, Glennie illuminates the fundamental embodiment of listening by integrating the sensations of vibration directly with and through her body. She wrote (1990, p. 103): I can also tell the quality of a note by what I feel. I can sense musical sound through my feet and lower body, and also through my hands, and I can identify the different notes as I press the pedal according to which part of my foot feels the vibrations and for how long, and by how I experience the vibrations in my body.

As discussed above, phenomenology studies human experience as a fundamentally embodied process and one crucial thing about listening is that it takes place in the body – it is, in essence, embodied. And one of its key elements as George Leonard (1978) pointed out, is rhythm: “in the vibrant molecular realm, everything is rhythm and electricity” (p. 47). Research in a variety of fields has revealed how pulsations and rhythm underscore everything from the dance of subatomic particles to the mysterious spiraling of super galaxies and everything in between – including the gestures and movements of the human body as we move about in our everyday social interactions. Basically, as the phenomenologist Henri Bergson (1911) noted over a hundred years ago, “Matter thus resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other, and travelling in every direction like shivers through an immense body” (p. 276). As mentioned above, perhaps the most influential philosophical phenomenologist of listening is Don Ihde, whose groundbreaking work, Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound (1976), balanced both the intrinsic and extrinsic dimensions of listening. Ihde (1976) described listening phenomenologically as: more than an intense and concentrated attention to sound and listening, it is also to be aware in the process of the pervasiveness of certain “beliefs” which intrude into my attempt to listen “to the things themselves.” Thus, the first listenings inevitably are not yet fully existentialized but occur in the midst of preliminary approximations. Listening begins with the ordinary, by proximately working its way into what is as yet unheard. (p. 49)

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Language and Communication: Inner Speech, Intersubjectivity, Interlistening Given the importance of the de‐familiarization process needed for the phenomenological reduction, listening phenomenologically to language raises another set of complex questions about how to listen outside the freight of familiar, already meaning‐laden signification. As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, one of the most important steps is the recognition of the impossibility of ever being completely and thoroughly outside language because the phenomenological reduction must occur inside language. Ihde began threading this needle by distinguishing between language as signification (meaning) and language as word (linguistic language) and writing: “From the outset, the ‘unit’ of meaning in a phenomenology is experiential rather than ‘merely’ linguistic” (1976, p. 150). Thus, gesture, tonality, and other modalities of expression are part of language as signification. But this still leaves the problem of the always present saturation of meaning in place. Fortunately, insights from Eastern traditions of mindfulness can shed some light on how to take a phenomenological approach to language (see Jones, this volume). Techniques of insight and vipaśyanā meditation, for example, provide tools for learning to de‐habituate from routinized, familiar ways of thinking and knowing (Bikkhu, 2012). The quality of awareness provided by mindfulness training allows the listener to hear with awareness of, but without either identification of or attachment to, the already familiar and already known meanings and associations. By allowing listeners to notice but not identify with or attach to meaning, and to attune to silences, elisions, gaps – whether they involve listening to self or to other – these mindful listening practices create a space for phenomenological inquiry into language. They also illuminate several paradoxes related the all‐too‐frequently taken for granted distinctions between inside and outside, self and other, and speaking and listening. For example, inner speech is often characterized as “self‐talk,” “hearing oneself think,” or “silent speech” (see Honeycutt, 2014). But from a phenomenological perspective, the distinction between inner and outer speech is, not surprisingly, blurrier than we might first imagine. For example, even the “innermost” thoughts in our head are permeated with words from “outside,” and these “exterior” voices echo and resonate in our most “interior” thoughts. As Ihde (1976) wrote, “the familiar and taken‐for‐granted character of my inner speech functions to maintain a certain familiarity within the environment. The voice of language domesticates the World” (p. 144). This is what James Carey (1992) meant when he described how thought is public and social – that our “innermost” thoughts can only be revealed by way of language that derives from “outside,” forever obscuring the boundaries between inside and out. In the early twentieth century, Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1986) theorized that inner speech develops first as an egocentric self‐talk that children address to themselves and demonstrated how this “outside‐in” process that begins with listening in the womb – first as neonates, and then as infants, and later as children, the mind develops as we gradually “internalize” the utterances of others’ language such that it becomes “ours” (see Altvater‐Mackensen, this volume). Vygotsky’s (1986) model of inner speech also stipulates two additional and important points. First, just as inner speech is not identical with thought, neither is it “the interior aspect of external speech – it is a function in itself” (p. 249). He wrote, “Inner speech…is closer to thought than external speech, so it encompasses more rudimentary levels of verbal processing than those forms of external communication that have been encoded for another person” (1986, p. 249). And one of the crucial functions of inner speech, according to Vygotsky, is to bring thoughts to completion, or, to put it another way, to give birth to thought; or, put in other words, speech is what makes thoughts possible. As Vygotsky (1986) wrote: But while in external speech thought is embodied in words, in inner speech words die as they bring forth thought. Inner speech is to a large extent thinking in pure meanings. It is a dynamic, shifting, unstable thing, fluttering between word and thought. (p. 249)



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One of the pioneering scholars of gesture, David McNeill (1992), described how “gestures do not just reflect thought but have an impact on thought. Gestures, together with language, help constitute thought.…Gestures occur because they are part of the speaker’s ongoing thought process” (p. 245). Thus, the mind, so thoroughly steeped in language as it is, needs to use language to render experience phenomenologically, both in and out of language at the same time. And just as the idea of inner speech blurs distinctions between inside and out, so the idea of intersubjectivity blurs distinctions between self and other by describing how meaning resides not in individuals, or intentions, or in words themselves, but in a shared co‐created space of meaning making. Originating in the field of phenomenology, the idea of intersubjectivity illustrates how listening extends far beyond the dualist horizons generated by bimodal speaker–listener approaches, linear subject–object orientation, and the tripartite temporal divisions of past‐present‐future. As will be explored below, just as every speaker also listens, so every listener also speaks – and not necessarily sequentially, quite often simultaneously. Intersubjectivity was originally associated with Husserl, who explored how the intersubjective world of shared social objects, constructs, and meanings must, by necessity, transcend the clearly bounded separation between selves. According to Husserl, the consciousness of the experiencing subjective self, or “I,” requires other subjective selves, or other “I’s,” to mediate and confirm the self’s understanding of the world. Husserl thus countered Cartesian solipsism with the understanding that the “I” is also an “other” to “others.” Martin Buber (1958), a contemporary of Husserl, developed these new insights about intersubjectivity into a philosophy of dialogue that centers on a study of the I–Thou relation and the constitutive power of between. For Buber, “real living is meeting,” and in meeting one suspends self‐centricity in order to open to the unpredictable and foreign land of between. Buber described how, in every interaction there exists a between, a place located in the space between self and other. Buber argued that the relation between self and other is foundational to human existence and, moreover, that the self can only come into being and exist when it is in dialogic relation with other human beings. As he wrote, “I become through my relation to the Thou; as I become I, I say Thou” (1958, p. 18). Thus, the self does not exist until it encounters another through the saying of Thou. Thought of in this way, the boundaries between self and other, inside and outside, mine and yours, become indistinct as the intersubjective between becomes an actor in its own right. Merleau‐Ponty (1962) penned a beautiful description of this process: In the experience of dialogue, there is constituted between the other person and myself a common ground; my thought and his are inter‐woven into a single fabric, my words and those of my interlocutor are called forth by the state of the discussion, and they are inserted into a shared operation of which neither of us is the creator. (p. 354)

At the same time as intersubjectivity introduces the inevitable and overlapping relation of the I to the other, it also underscores the fundamental otherness of the other. Both Buber and the philosopher Immanuel Levinas theorized the fundamental constitutive difference between ego and alter, and find ethics at the heart of this difference. Buber (1998, p. 59) described the I–Thou relation as an encounter with alterity and how: [g]enuine conversation, and therefore every actual fulfillment of relation between men, means acceptance of otherness.…[E]verything depends so far as human life is concerned, on whether each thinks of the other as the one he is, whether each, that is, with all his desire to influence the other, nevertheless unreservedly accepts and confirms him in his being this man and in his being made in this particular way.

To Levinas, the face of the other is the manifestation of the ethical exigency that is woven into the very structure of human being. As such, the face of the other calls my being into question. The face is neither figurative nor literal, but is instead the expression of the other’s

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ethical demand upon the self. Levinas (1969) noted that “The facing position, opposition par excellence, can be only as a moral summons” (p. 196). In his early work, Levinas (1993) was drawn to sound’s ability to destabilize and disrupt the apparent mastery of vision. Here, Levinas began with the idea of sound as word and explored the power of speech to disrupt the empire of the self and establish an intersubjective relation. He wrote, “There is in fact in sound  –  and in consciousness understood as hearing  –  a shattering of the always complete world of vision.…Sound is all repercussion, outburst, scandal” (1993, p. 147). Given this early acknowledgment of the ethical importance of voice and sound, it is curious that Levinas would come to so neglect listening in his subsequent work. But in spite of his earlier explorations of sound, word, and the invocation of the other, Levinas rarely referenced speech’s other: listening; and, of course, he is neither the first nor last philosopher to make this omission. Some contemporary scholars of dialogue have built on Buber and Levinas’s insights to develop a more phenomenological approach to listening. For example, Bodie and Crick (2014) drew on Charles Pierce’s phenomenology to examine how the relation to otherness is always already implicit in listening. They find in Pierce’s tripartite model of firstness, secondness, and thirdness the way in which “listening is characterized by a plural consciousness sensitive to [Thirdness] Mediation” (p. 106). Drawing from a more continental tradition of phenomenology, Lipari (2009) described how the ethical relation is enacted listening otherwise, which “suspends the willfulness of self‐ and foreknowledge in order to receive the singularities of the alterity of the other” (p. 56). Lipari contended that the ethical response requires listening otherwise not merely for an exchange of signs or receipt of information, but for the emergent self‐transcendence that involves opening and vulnerability, which Levinas would call a trauma and Gadamer a fundamental openness. That is, listening otherwise is an act of both opening and renunciation. In this form of open listening, we give up attachment to our familiar and already understood certainties and cognitions about the world in order to fully re‐cognize the other. Another phenomenological scholar of dialogue, Z. D. Gurevitch (1988), likened it to an “‘interpersonal Copernican discovery’…one’s sense of centrality is lost and with it the taken‐for‐granted meaning of all that this centrality entailed” (p. 1188). Thus, opening to the other is a kind of phenomenological reduction or process of defamiliarization in which we renounce the familiar and embrace the strange. He noted, “When the other is perceived as strange, he or she is liberated from the image that one has projected onto the other’s experience from the center of one’s self. The other emerges as an independent and ‘distant’ phenomenon” (1988, p. 1190). Gurevitch built a phenomenology of alterity to theorize what he called “the ability to not understand,” which is achieved by making the other strange, suspending one’s familiar understandings, and withstanding the tensions of not understanding. He wrote, “The real difficulty is how to debunk previous images of understanding – that is, to ‘de‐explain’ rather than [to] explain, to ‘de‐reason’ rather than to reason, to restore strangeness into the active framework of the encounter” (1989, p. 163). As will be examined further, the contemporary philosopher Bernard Waldenfels (2011) has developed a phenomenology of responsivity that takes the fact, significance, and ­irredeemability of alterity as its central focus. The third dualistic boundary that is blurred through phenomenological listening is the distinction between speaking and listening. Bakhtin (1986) referred to the distinction between speaking and listening as a “fiction that produces a completely distorted idea of the complex and multifaceted process of active speech communication” (p. 68), while Bergson (2001) asked, “[H]as it not been said that to hear is to speak to oneself?” (p. 44). We also hear echoes of this synchronicity from Merleau‐Ponty when he described how “[t]he orator does not think before speaking; his speech is his thought” (1962, p. 180). Lipari’s (2014a) phenomenological approach to listening finds a similar disruption of the distinction between listening and speaking. She coined interlistening to express the dialogic simultaneity of listening, thinking, and speaking as well as to counter speech‐centricity by cultivating phenomenological attention and awareness. Interlistening thus expresses the simultaneity of listening, thinking, and speaking by describing the ways in which listening is itself a form of speaking, because each



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utterance and action of listening and speaking resonates with a background context where an always already existing universe of prior dialogic relations vibrates. In human communication, interlistenings reverberate with connections to everything heard, thought, said, and read in the past, present, and future lives of each interlistener. Interlistening thus brings a multiple emphasis on the inter‐ of interaction, interdependency, interrelation, intersubjectivity, as well as an acknowledgment of the attunement, attentiveness, and alterity always already nested in our processes of communication. Lipari (2014b) theorized three dimensions of interlistening: polymodal (occurring across multiple sensory modalities such as seeing, tasting, speaking, listening, and so forth); polyphonic (occurring through the voices of different characters); and polychronic (occurring in a confused multiplicity of temporal modalities such as past, present, future, duration, and so forth). Polymodality pertains to the embodied dimension of interlistening and involves proprioception, the interacting and mutually influencing patterns of breathing, posture, and gesture. It also involves the sensory dimensions of smell, taste, and touch, as well as body movement and energy. Polychronicity involves the rhythmic aspects of interlistening, such as timing, order, sequence, coordination, syncopation, repetition, and punctuation, as well as the tensed aspect of interlistening, and disrupts linear conceptions of time expressed by grammatical notions of past, present, and future. For example, while the syntax of language gives an illusion of separate, linear temporality where things occur separately and sequentially, consider how Vygotsky (1986, p. 251) described seeing a boy in a blue shirt running down the street: Thought, unlike speech, does not consist of separate units. When I wish to communicate the thought that today I saw a barefoot boy in a blue shirt running down the street, I do not see every item separately: the boy, the shirt, its blue color, his running, the absence of shoes. I conceive of all this in one thought, but I put it into separate words.

Polyphony refers both to Bakhtin’s notions of voice and point of view as well as to the musical and punctuated rhythmic dimension of interlistening – all of the auditory and nonverbal qualities of the communicative interaction – that characterize the “confused multiplicity” of interlistening.

Conclusion As discussed at the beginning of this chapter, to begin with a question such as “what is the object of phenomenology’s inquiry?” is to immediately posit consciousness in the Cartesian framework of a subject (consciousness) encountering objects (phenomena) in the world separate and apart from itself and held at a distance. But as phenomenologies of listening suggest, the human experience of phenomena is not entirely external to consciousness, but part of consciousness itself. This means phenomenology of listening must study the experience (engagement) of the mind (and body) interacting with (responding to) phenomena (whether objects or other subjects). Bernard Waldenfels, a contemporary philosopher who studied with Merleau‐Ponty, has rethought phenomenology away from the perspective of intentionality or comportment, and toward the perspective of interaction and responsivity. Waldenfels’s (2011) phenomenology studies the interrelationship of response between self and other as forever entangled at the same time. Similar to Merleau‐Ponty’s idea of chiasmus, or intertwining – of the non‐duality of touching and being touched, Waldenfels (2011) described how: our body does not fit into this dualistic scheme. On the one hand, our body is exactly both at once: seeing and seen, hearing and heard, touching and touched, moving and moved. This noncoincidence…characterizes the very being of our body, which refers to itself and at the same time evades itself. (p. 56)

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Perhaps not surprisingly, Waldenfels’s ideas are deeply resonant with listening, as well as with some Eastern philosophical traditions that reject non‐duality. Traditions such as the idea of interdependent co‐arising in early Buddhism, or with the Madhyamaka idea of emptiness, which holds that nothing has an inherent existence that can exist entirely independently, ­separately, on its own. As the famous verse from Nagarjuna, the first‐century Buddhist founder of the Madhyameka school, expressed: “Whatever is dependently co‐arisen, that is explained to be emptiness…Something that is not dependently arise, such a thing does not exist” (Garfield, 1995, p. 304). Or, put in contemporary philosophical terms: “Emptiness is just literally dependent co‐arising. Constitutive fragility. Constitutive impermanence. Constitutive conditionality. Lack of independent identity. Constitutive context‐dependence. Constituent inter‐action. Constitutive relationship: to be is to be interacting. This means, in sum, constitutive openness to alterity” (Ziporyn, 2016, pp. 158–159). Because phenomenology (let alone a phenomenology of listening), is fundamentally an inter‐ and intra‐disciplinary enterprise, its studies are driven by many different questions, projects, goals, and points of view. Thus phenomenological studies of listening will by necessity address the tensions between what we might call “traditional” phenomenology and various phenomenologies of listening in a number of different ways. As described already, scholars take a wide variety of approaches vis‐à‐vis the four aforementioned concepts (of structure, view, intentionality, and objects) over a range of phenomenological studies of listening, be they in relation to acoustic, musical, or linguistic communication phenomena. But at the end of the day, because of its constitutional openness to alterity, most thoroughgoing phenomenological examinations of listening seem to require a way to twist free of subject–object duality and engage with the mystifying qualities of ambiguity, fragility, and impermanence so characteristic of listening. Why? Because by taking the idea of the phenomenological reduction seriously we are able to recognize the vast intertwinings of time (in terms of historicity and linear separations between past, present, and future), of sensibility (in terms of mind/body and multi‐sensory apprehension), and alterity (in terms of self, other, and the non‐dual between) that are enacted when listening occurs, be it at the level of individual, interindividual, organizational, cultural communication phenomena.

References Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres & other late essays (V. McGee, Trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas. Bergson, H. (1911). Matter and memory (N. M. Paul & W. S. Palmer, Trans.). London: George Allen & Unwin. Bergson, H. (2001). Time and free will: An essay on the immediate data of consciousness. (R. L. Pogson, Trans.). Mineola, NY: Dover. Bijsterveld, K. (2003). The diabolical symphony of the mechanical age. In M. Bull & L. Back (Eds.), The auditory culture reader (pp. 165–189). New York: Berg. Bikkhu, T. (2012). With each & every breath. Valley Center, CA: Metta Forest Monastery. Blesser, B., & Salter, L‐R. (2007). Spaces speak, are you listening? Cambridge, MA: MIT. Bodie, G. D., & Crick, N. (2014). Listening, hearing, sensing: Three modes of being and the phenomenology of Charles Sanders Peirce. Communication Theory, 24, 105–123. https://doi.org/10.1111/ comt.12032 Bregman, A. (1994). Auditory scene analysis: The perceptual organization of sound. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT. Brower, C. (2008). Paradoxes of pitch space. Music Analysis, 27(1), 51–106. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1468‐2249.2008.00268.x Buber, M. (1958). I and thou (R. G. Smith, Trans.). New York: Scribner. Buber, M. (1998). The knowledge of man: Selected essays. Amherst, NY: Humanity.



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Carey, J. W. (1992). Communication as culture: Essays on media and society. New York: Routledge. Garfield, J. L. (Trans.). (1995). The fundamental wisdom of the middle way: Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika. New York: Oxford University Press. Glennie, E. (1990). Good vibrations. Long Preston, North Yorkshire, England: Magna Print. Glennie, E. (2008). How to truly listen TED Talk. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/evelyn_ glennie_shows_how_to_listen/transcript Gurevitch, Z. D. (1988). The other side of dialogue: On making the other strange and the experience of otherness. American Journal of Sociology, 93, 1179–1199. Gurevitch, Z. D. (1989). The power of not understanding: The meeting of conflicting identities. Journal of Applied Behavioral Sciences, 25, 161–173. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021886389252006 Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Heidegger, M. (1988). The basic problems of phenomenology (A. Hofstadter, Trans.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Honeycutt, J. M. (2014). Imagined interactions. In C. R. Berger (Ed.), Handbooks of communication science: Interpersonal communication (Vol. 6; pp. 249–271). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Husserl, E. (2001). Logical investigations (J. N. Findlay, Trans.). New York: Routledge. Ihde, D. (1976). Listening and voice: A phenomenology of sound. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Kayser, H. (1970). Akroasis: The theory of world harmonics (R. Lilienfeld, Trans.). Boston, MA: Plowshare. Leonard, G. (1978). The silent pulse. New York: Arkana. Levinas, E. (1993). The transcendence of words: On Michel Leiris’s Biffures. In M. Smith (Trans.), Outside the subject (pp. 144–150). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority (A. Lingis, Trans.). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Lindenlauf, A. (2005). Review of Akroasis. Der akustische Sinnesbereich in der griechischen Literatur bis zum Ende der klassischen Zeit. Tübinger Phänomenologische Bibliothek [Akroasis. The acoustic sensory area in Greek literature until the end of the classical period, Tubingen Phenomenological Library] by G. Wille. Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 9, 1–7. Lipari, L. (2014a). Listening, thinking, being: Toward an ethics of attunement. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Lipari, L. (2014b). On interlistening and the idea of dialogue. Theory & Psychology, 24, 504–523. Lipari, L. (2009). Listening otherwise: The voice of ethics. International Journal of Listening, 23, 44–59. https://doi.org/10.1080/10904010802591888 McNeill, D. (1992). Hand and mind: What gestures reveal about thought. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Merleau‐Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception (C. Smith, Trans.). New York: Routledge. Merleau‐Ponty, M. (1969). The essential writings of Merleau‐Ponty. (A. L. Fisher, Ed., Trans.). New York: Harcourt. O’Callaghan, C. (2011). Against hearing meanings. The Philosophical Quarterly, 61, 783–807. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9213.2011.704.x O’Callaghan, C. (2017). Sounds: A philosophical theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Oliveros, P. (2005). Deep listening: A composer’s sound practice. New York: iUniverse. Oliveros, P. (2006). Improvisation in the sonosphere. Contemporary Music Review, 25, 481–482. Riedelsheimer, T. (2004). Touch the sound: A sound journey with Evelyn Glennie [Documentary, DVD]. Shadow Distribution. Schaeffer, P. (1966). Traité des objets musicaux. [Treatise on musical objects]. Paris: Le Seuil. Schaeffer, P. (2012). In search of a concrete music (C. North & J. Dack, Trans.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Schafer, R. M. (1977/1994). Soundscape: Our sonic environment and the tuning of the world. Rochester, VT: Destiny. Smith, F. J. (1967). Insights leading to a phenomenology of sound. The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 5, 187–199. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-6962.1967.tb02010.x Smith, D. W. (2018, Summer). Phenomenology. Stanford Encyclopedia of Phenomenology. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ sum2018/entries/phenomenology

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Sound. (n.d.). In Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved from https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/1851 24?result=3&rskey=9OJN2W& von Helmholtz, H. (1885). On the sensations of tone as a physiological basis for the theory of music. (A. J. Ellis, Trans.). (2nd ed.). London: Longmans, Green. Vygotsky, L. (1986). Thought and language (A. Kozulin, Trans). Cambridge, MA: MIT. Waldenfels, B. (2011). Phenomenology of the alien: Basic concepts. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press. Ziporyn, B. A. (2016). Emptiness and omnipresence: An essential introduction to Tiantai Buddhism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

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Interpretive Approaches Mohan J. Dutta and Phoebe Elers

Interpretive scholarship is particularly critical to elucidating the intricacies, complexities, and dynamically shifting nature of listening (Chase, 2003). While listening emerges as an explicit focal area in some interpretive scholarship, however, more often it does so implicitly through its absence/presence in descriptions of interactions and experiences (see Backos & Pagon, 1999; Sharf & Vanderford, 2003; Narayan, Chambers, Shah, & Petesch, 2000). Particularly salient in interpretive scholarship is the implicit depiction of listening as an entry point to understanding a phenomenon (Maggio, 2007; Ortner, 1995). For instance, studies attending to listening in health contexts range from clinical encounters to the organizing of health ­services to the political economy of health. Although these contexts might not explicitly foreground listening, the negotiations of health within various structures draw out listening as the anchor to human experience. Similarly, conceptualizing listening as a construct in politics offers insights into the political transformations taking place globally, the nature of these ­transformations, the role of listening amid these transformations, and the implications of the erasure of listening. As an underpinning element of various qualitative research methods that constitute interpretive approaches, listening offers important conceptual tenets for consideration. Taking into account and grappling with these concepts of listening is quintessential to designing strong interpretive projects. Moreover, the act of listening as a communicative device forms the basis of phenomena from the organizing of space to the narration of history to the organizing of society. In this sense, we argue the need to expand where and what we are looking for in approaching listening research, and in seeking examples of interpretive approaches to listening. Toward this goal, we outline various interpretive methods in the study of listening, listening scholarship in different contexts and communication, and future directions for interpretive scholarship of listening.

Interpretive Methods in Listening Research Scholars have drawn on a wide range of interpretive methods to offer conceptual insights into listening. These interpretive methods seek to describe the meaning of listening, attending to the contexts within which acts of listening are constituted. In this section, we will walk through The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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several specific interpretive methods, attending to the listening scholarship that uses these methods and the ways in which listening scholarship shapes interpretive methods.

Ethnography as Listening The ethnographic approach to listening offers theoretical insights into listening through “thick description” of listening practices in cultural contexts (for review, see Overton, 2018). What is salient about the ethnographic approach is the immersion of the researcher within the context, creating conceptual categories based on close empirical observations. Importantly, the theoretical robustness of a study is closely tied to the richness of the observations made by the researcher. Whereas observation, as a metaphor, typically captures what one sees and registers through vision, however, ethnographies are more than registering through sight. Indeed, the researcher places their body into the field. Attending to the multi‐sensory nature of ethnography thus foregrounds the role of listening as an ethnographic tool. One might argue that ethnography as a method itself is a listening act, as researchers place themselves in contexts to narrate emergent stories, weaved together in conceptual threads.

Ethnographies of Listening

Kapchan (2017) described her situated account of Sufi singers in Morocco and France as an “ethnography of listening” and made “listening to people listen” central to her longitudinal research of Sufi Muslim performances and rituals (p. 281). She described “listening acts” as witnesses of pain and suffering, as political tools, and as methods of “sound knowledge transmission” (p. 281). In her study, listening is both a method of ethnographic translation as well as a transformative practice. In describing the sound practices of Sufi women in France, Kapchan (2017) depicted the ways in which the women, who rarely grow up learning the language, sing the praise songs with flawless pronunciation because their initiation process takes place through the ear, what she described as “intentional listening” (p. 279). Descriptive accounts of interactions also point to the failures of listening. In a chapter titled “Deadly soundscapes,” Deborah Wong (2017) offered a “thick description” of the interactions between police officers responding to reports of a young African American man walking up and down the street, uttering profanities, stripping off his clothes, kissing the pavement, and performing a range of bizarre behaviors. As she described the sound recording of the interaction between the man, Lee Deante Brown, and the officers, she critically interrogated the “truth” that is captured by the “belt recorders” worn by officers and the sound writing (transcription of the sounds). Through her close reading, Wong attended to the impossibility of listening, paradoxically in the backdrop of the sense of “truthiness” offered by the low‐fi recording instrument. That police officers perform to “belt recorders,” strategically deploying them toward particular performances in what could become “officer‐involved death,” with the likelihood of the sound writing used as evidence during investigation, suggests the complexities of “truth” in listening (p. 269): According to law enforcement logic, an officer‐involved death can be fixed during the investigation by showing that the perlocutionary utterance (“Stop or I’ll shoot! Put your hands behind your back!”) was refused. If so, the officer’s actions were “in policy” and the victim brought on the consequences, or the victim could have avoided the problem by complying. But the deeper problem is that the perlocutionary utterance failed: it was supposed to do something, but it didn’t. This leaves everyone in impossible positions: the officer has no option except to keep repeating the key utterance, and anyone beyond the reach of such logic is in real danger



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Listening in this sense moves beyond a positivist acknowledgment of that which is present to closely attending to that which is absent.

Listening as a Methodological Intervention

As noted earlier, whereas the dominant approach to ethnographic observations has ­foregrounded textual translation of observations, attention to listening as a methodological tool affects how ethnographies are conducted. The example of sound writing in the work of Wong (2017), for instance, works on translating and interpreting sounds into text, utilizing close analyses to depict the various layers of movement of sound, interpretation, and meaning. Closely listening to everyday interactions with attention to sounds brings out observations for analyses. Similarly, responding orally through sounds in the process of drawing out analytical themes offers new modes to moving through data. Ethnographic tools such as documentary film making and digital storytelling also offer avenues for listening sense‐making, bringing voice to the fore (for examples, see Russell, 1999).

In‐depth Interviews Like ethnography, interviews allow researchers to listen to participants while conducting field work. An in‐depth interview can be defined as a conversation, “in which a researcher gently guides a conversational partner in an extended discussion” (Rubin & Rubin, 2005, p. 4). The way it is conducted, however, is central to the research project, because the quality of the data gathered are products of the interview (Nunkoosing, 2005), making the interviewer “a tool of an instrument” (Goode & Hatt, 1952, p. 185). Thus, in‐depth interviews are widely considered to be co‐constructed (Josselson, 2013) “collaborative [efforts]” (Fontana & Frey, 2005, p. 696). As such, listening is imperative, as the interviewer’s understanding and responses can encourage or discourage areas for discussion. Many of the lessons learned about listening thus emerge from descriptive and reflexive analyses of the listener, the listened‐to, and the relational context of the interviewing process.

The Listener

To comprehend spoken language, listeners must discriminate between sounds; understand vocabulary, grammatical structures, stress, and intonation; and interpret what has been comprehended within the larger socio‐cultural context (Vandergrift, 1999; see Imhof, this volume). But listening to sounds should not be considered in isolation; for what is heard is not only a function of sounds but also of other senses (Bodie & Wolvin, in press; Overton, 2018). Nonverbal behavior conveys meaning, including proxemics, facial expressions, gestures, haptics, eye gaze, and appearance (Martin & Nakayama, 2013). These cues are not spoken but are crucial for interpersonal communication, and it is the interviewer’s role to listen and interpret both the literal content of what is being said and the way in which it is expressed (i.e., relational meanings; Watzlawick, Beavin, & Jackson, 1967). Moreover, listening is not a neutral practice. For one, family, social, and ethnic groups and cultures use and interpret verbal and non‐verbal communication cues differently (Beall, 2010). Scholars have suggested strategies for overcoming intercultural barriers, such as listening for the participant’s cultural and individual values, expanding one’s knowledge of the cultural norms of other cultures, and listening with an open mind (Harris, 2000). For this to be achieved, there is a need for self‐reflection, paying regular attention to the context that allows one to organize, change, and reformulate perceptions, beliefs, and practices (Willis, 2007). There is also need for scrutiny and transparency regarding the predispositions that have guided the research project (Purdy, 2010). These predispositions impact what the researcher listens to, deems to be important, and responds

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to, opening the discussion to additional explanations. Indeed, it would be naïve to ­pretend that the researcher’s status, race, culture, and gender do not influence what a participant feels they can say or how they decide to say it (Nunkoosing, 2005). As Josselson (2013) acknowledged, “participants are creating narratives for us and shaping them according to their assessments of who we are and how we are responding to them” (p. 11). In other words, listeners are co‐narrators in a communicative exchange (Bavelas, Coates, & Johnson, 2000).

The Listened‐to

Just as important as considering how the listener influences in‐depth interviews is critically evaluating the role of participants, their vulnerabilities, what is ethical to be shared, and the impact of the research. This highlights the complexity of the interview, whereby the interviewer must closely listen to the verbal and nonverbal content while simultaneously scrutinizing the broader context and interview process (Briggs, 1986). Listening to both the content and broader context should also occur when analyzing and accurately presenting interview material. Contextual and non‐verbal communication cues are crucial for interpreting meaning in an in‐depth interview, but can be difficult to empirically measure and describe. Yet this is a strength of interpretive research – the ability to express that which is not easily measured. If there are video or audio recordings of the interview, then this needs to be transcribed verbatim noting nonverbal cues, and recordings should be referred to during the analysis. Finally, findings should be presented back to the participants when possible to create another space for listening and gaining feedback, which in turn may act as a catalyst for further research. Accordingly, listening in fieldwork can require commitment from the researcher as part of an ongoing process that does not start and stop at the beginning and end of the interview.

The Relational Context

Of course, while attending to the interviewee, and acknowledging that the listener’s unique predispositions and habits are both important; listening in interpersonal contexts is ultimately part of a communicative exchange between two or more people. Returning to Lipari (2010), listening is relationally oriented, and so the relationship between the listener and the speaker should not be ignored. One important variable influencing how interviews traverse is rapport. Listening has been identified as an important tool for increasing understanding between the researcher and participant (Lindlof & Taylor, 2011), which may result in more honest participant responses and richer datasets. Yet there are ethical issues in developing relationships built on trust to elicit unguarded confidences and gain material that the interviewer deems interesting or important (Kvale, 2006; Duncombe & Jessop, 2012). While building relationships may appear to lessen power relationships, unless the participant is fully informed about the purpose and intentions of the research, such lessening is a mirage. Interviews are encounters in which one person attempts to obtain information for a particular purpose (Kvale, 2006). Consequently, by nature, power imbalances can never be completely overcome. More broadly, listening can be a way for interviewers to conduct ethical research. For instance, Fletcher (1999) drawing on her experiences of conducting in‐depth interviews with police officers, depicted the most important element of listening as learning to give up control. By offering various accounts of police narratives, she depicted the ways in which giving up control in the interviewing process enabled meaningful stories to emerge. Constructing interviews as listening acts embedded in relationships points toward the necessity of conversations over time that voice concepts emergent from mutually constituted meanings (e.g., Connolly & Sicola, 2005).



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Focus Groups Focus groups are frequently used in conjunction with other methods, including ethnography and in‐depth interviews (Davis, 2016). They can be described as group discussions focused on specific situations or topics (Stewart, Shamdasani, & Rook, 2014), and they share some characteristics of in‐depth interviews (e.g., open‐ended questions, responses are recorded and later analyzed). Focus groups, however, are not a substitute for in‐depth interviews, as they involve interaction among participants (Wilkinson, 1998), and thus provide insights on group norms (Jakobsen, 2012) and the co‐construction of realities between participants (Davis, 2016).

Gathering Focus Group Data

The process of listening described for in‐depth interview settings should be applied when conducting a focus group, but the researcher must listen to both the participant speaking at a given time and other participants’ simultaneous responses. Focus group moderators must also attend to group dynamics and be mindful of threats to validity such as groupthink or dominating personalities. Indeed, it is not only the views expressed that are of interest within a focus group, but also how these views are socially constructed and the dynamics of presenting and defending ideas between participants (Hammett, Twyman, & Graham, 2015). Therefore, the researcher should listen for interaction data in action, such as joking, arguing, teasing, persuasion, challenging, and disagreement between participants (Davis, 2016). Considering the importance of this interaction, the composition of the participants becomes one of the most important aspects of the research design (Morgan, 2008). There is no standard number of participants required for a focus group, although it is generally made up of between 4 to 12 people (Davis, 2016) and more commonly 6 to 8 (Wilkinson, 1998). Larger groups are prone to being dominated by a subsection of the group, while smaller groups are easier to moderate but can reduce participants’ willingness to speak (Hammett et al., 2015). Groups can be recruited from pre‐existing collectives or be drawn together specifically for the discussion, with each recruitment method resulting in specific challenges in developing rapport and encouraging open discussion (Hammett et al., 2015). However, the needs of participants should also be listened to and accommodated where possible, an aspect often neglected by researchers (Morgan, 2008). Of course, even with the most careful of planning, there still exists the possibility of divergence between the planned research design and the reality of conducting focus groups in the field. For example, Hennink (2007) described a student’s experience conducting a focus group in Malawi, who stated: “The whole village was there, waiting, and I was faced with the problem of getting only eight participants for the group!” (p. 140). She offered several strategies to address this situation, including using a screening questionnaire, conducting simultaneous focus groups, and even conducting a ‘dummy’ discussion group, but ultimately, the most suitable strategy involves listening to the needs of participants and the larger community and considering how these can be negotiated with the research purpose. A poignant example of how the collective nature of focus groups can be used to provide a space for marginalized groups to speak and be listened to is found in Madriz (1998). In her work with Latina women in New York City and northern New Jersey, she reported focus groups as “as a form of collective testimony that yields accessibility to the lives of lower socioeconomic status Latina women, uncovering the complexity of layers that shape their collective‐ and individual‐life experiences” (p. 125). This is not to say that all power imbalance between the researcher and participants can be removed. The researcher still needs to undergo self‐reflexivity, considering the predispositions that may influence their actions and listening focus. Recruiting participants from pre‐existing collectives can also result in “othering” of the interviewer, and so the researcher should consider their positionality in the research (Jakobsen, 2012).

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Analysis of Focus Group Data

The analysis of focus groups shares some similarities with in‐depth interviews (Morgan, 2008), and, as part of the process of listening, should be discussed with participants to gain further feedback when possible. Analyzing focus group data, again, involves listening not only for what is being said but also how, by whom, and under what conditions, drawing out the way that interaction contributed to meaning making (Hammett et al., 2015). In the end, the findings should be analyzed and reported as a product of the group, not as individuals (Short, 2006). As the group setting gives participants a space to discuss topics and have increased control over the research interaction, focus groups often start with the researcher asking participants to focus on topics that are most important to the research purpose, and end with the researcher listening to topics that are most important to the participants (Morgan, 2008).

Case Studies A number of interpretive descriptions of listening use the case study approach in which intensive attention is given to a single person, group, or culture (Bennett & Elman, 2006). In the case study approach, a specific number of cases are selected in order to elucidate specific elements of listening through in‐depth descriptions. Whereas in many instances the case study approach works with a single case in depth, in other approaches, cases are compared and contrasted with each other to glean insights into a phenomenon. Critical elements of the case study approach are the criteria for the selection of the case(s), selection of the case(s), the systematic gathering of data to describe the case(s) qualitatively, and the analysis of the case(s) to draw out theoretical insights (Bennett & Elman, 2006; Houghton, Casey, Shaw, & Murphy, 2013). The unit of analysis in the case is key, with an emphasis on selecting a unit that would offer most theoretical depth. Within the case then, some combination of qualitative methods is used for the gathering of interpretive accounts. In‐depth interviews within specific cases are often combined with participant observations. For instance, interpretive accounts of the “Listening Tour” undertaken in the Middle East by the American Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, Karen Hughes, offer insights into the nature of listening, its rhetorical positioning, and the interplay of rhetoric and materiality (Cull, 2010). Similarly, case‐based accounts of interpersonal interactions have been used extensively in clinical contexts to offer insights into the nature of listening in these interactions (e.g., Stein, Frankel, & Krupat, 2005). In such accounts, case‐based descriptions of interactions offer accounts into the nature of listening in clinical encounters, the role of power in constituting these encounters, and the possibilities of collaborative decision‐making. Other case studies of health organizations (such as non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) addressing HIV/AIDS) point to the ways in which power is organized within organizations and their interactions with key stakeholders, the presence of communicative spaces, and the negotiations of these spaces in the delivery of interventions. For instance, de Souza (2009) compared across cases of organizations to demonstrate the convergences and divergences between NGOs that are run by outside experts as compared to NGOs that are run by community members experiencing the lived realities of negotiating HIV/AIDS. In the context of environmental communication, an ethnographic account of an agricultural cooperative run by lower caste women farmers offers insights into communicative practices of organizing agricultural solutions to climate change (Dutta & Thaker, 2019).

Performance In his formative work with performance, Conquergood (2002) drew attention to the disruptive capacity of performance to interrogate the text by creating anchors to listening. Performance places the body in the communicative space and in doing so brings in an over-



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arching commitment to listening (see McRae, this volume). Through the presence of bodies, experiences are listened to that are hitherto erased. Diary writing and writing as a performance is one form of moving back and forth in the interaction to create an anchor to listening. The diary itself emerges as a medium for communicating back and forth between the researcher and the participant. For instance, diaries written by patients offer accounts of the healing journey, the negotiations of interactions with families and care providers, and the communicative struggles of patients (Lepore & Smyth, 2002). Similarly, performances such as theater, dances, songs, as well as other forms of art offer interpretive anchors to meanings that are hitherto erased, thus building discursive anchors for registering narratives, especially amidst totalitarian control. Performances, for instance, of songs that narrate genocide build discursive anchors to material accounts through listening, often working against forms of totalitarian control in the service of imperial capital that strategically erase infrastructures for voice (Pitaloka & Dutta, 2019). Autoethnography is another specific performative device that builds registers for listening. In particular, autoethnography narrates the story of the self in journeying through specific life events. For example, Allen, Orbe, and Olivas (1999) offer autoethnographic accounts of the lived experiences with racism in the academe. Recent articulations of racist structures of Communication Studies offer anchors for listening to the voices of differences at the margins of the discipline (Rodriguez, Dutta, & Desnoyers‐Collas, 2019). Chawla’s (2014) autoethnographic account of the mobility of home as an affective register builds an anchor to listening to the immigrant voice as it negotiates the attachment to home amid migration.

Summary In this section, we reviewed the different interpretive methods that have been adopted in the context of listening. These different methods offer different ways of listening into forms of communication; in turn, listening as a conceptual anchor constitutes important methodological interventions into Interpretivism. In the next section, we will explore the nature of interpretive scholarship in different contexts of communication.

Interpretation Across Contexts Interpretive methods offer anchors to listening in a wide array of contexts of communication. In this section, we highlight several areas: health, technology, and environment, where interpretive approaches have been adopted to offer insights into listening. Although this section has been organized by contexts, it is worth noting upfront that this framework of categorizing by context is largely artificial.

Listening and Health Ethnographic descriptions of health interactions often foreground the nature, context, and forms of listening. Participant observations, particularly “thick descriptions” of health and illness experiences, the processes of seeking health, the experiences with seeking health, and the negotiations of experienced challenges, underscore the nature of listening in health contexts. In a powerful ethnography of the health interaction among indigenous people in the Venezuelan delta, Briggs and Mantini‐Briggs (2016) explored the death of children from rabies, amid the absence of infrastructures for listening to indigenous communities. The ethnographic account situates communicative justice amid listening, depicting the ways in which the health care system is organized to delegitimize, stigmatize, and erase indigenous knowledge,

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resulting in threats to the health of the indigenous people. Other work by Fadiman (2012) and Dutta (2004) also depict the ways in which listening constitutes the everyday experiences of disenfranchisement and loss. In addition to ethnography, participant observation and in‐depth interviews have been used to further our understanding of listening in the health context (see, for example, October, Dizon, & Roter, 2018). In a study by Rodrigues, Patel, Jaswal, and De Souza (2003) with post childbirth mothers in Goa, India, for instance, in‐depth interviews registered the voices of the women, situating their experiences of postpartum depression in the sociocultural context. The presence of the voices of the mothers through listening interrupts the biomedical model by attending to the patriarchal culture, the role of fathers, and gender preference.

Technologies and Engagement Technologies are increasingly being used to assist organizations with external communication, such as aspects of social media and media relations, even though practitioners have raised concerns that they can neither maintain the same level of personable relationships nor replace human creativity (Galloway & Swiatek, 2018). Macnamara (this volume) suggested that while technology can be part of the architecture of listening, it is not a solution in itself. Inevitably, the cost of establishing an effective architecture of listening can be substantial, both technologically and in educating practitioners in listening practices (Macnamara, this volume), with scholars already reporting a gap between theorized best practice, and the industry focus on tactics, technical skills, and one‐way messaging. In failing to listen effectively, many organizations are not operationalizing dialogic relationships and two‐way communication models that are prominent in public relations scholarship (e.g., Auger, 2013; Linvill, McGee, & Hicks, 2012). In these cases, the benefits of organizational listening will not be realized; for without continued listening, it is difficult to meet the needs of all publics. Organizational listening is also required to fulfill a democratic and participatory approach to strategic communication. Emerging critiques of technology‐based approaches to engagement point to the surveillance functions served by technologies to consolidate their power and control, while simultaneously co‐opting the voices of individuals, households, communities (Dutta, 2018). What is salient in interpretive analyses of listening technologies is the gap between the rhetoric of listening and the actual experiences of listening. The large‐scale proliferation of big data formulated as listening architecture of techno‐capital privatizes human participation by commoditizing participation as data, deploying the data toward techniques of surveillance and manipulation that keep power and control in the hands of capital (Zuboff, 2019).

Listening in Environmental Communication The study “Listening and landscape among the Blackfeet” conducted by Carbaugh (1999) is a listening ethnography of the Blackfeet Native Americans. In depicting the listening experiences of the Blackfeet, Carbaugh located listening among the landscapes of the Western plains. The notion that listening among Native Americans is deeply intertwined with the landscape itself foregrounds the cultural, contextual, and ecologically situated nature of listening. In a similar vein, ethnographic fieldwork conducted by Dutta (2004) with Santalis in Eastern India foregrounded the location of listening in the relationships that Santalis had with trees. These participant observations, through collaborative interactions with communities, offer insights into the practices of listening to nature. Such insight on listening to nature is also emergent in the ethnographic account offered by Beeman (2006) working with Anishinaabe elders. The accounts of lived experiences offered by



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the elders depicted deep‐rooted connections to the forests, situated amid their everyday ­practices of listening to and speaking about the natural world. It is in this acknowledgment of the ecosystem that the non‐living secures a speaking position (Roszak, 2001). To learn to listen to practices of listening to non‐speaking objects calls for re‐orienting the approach to  participant observation, activating all senses in taking in experiences, processing them, feeling them, and responding to them.

From Interpretation to Decolonization and a Culture‐centered Approach Readers interested in other contexts, within which listening is studied, are directed to chapters within Parts IV and V of this volume. In the interest of space, the chapter now turns to a specific interpretive approach we have found useful in not only providing in‐depth understanding but also empowerment of communities and subaltern voices. Set against a backdrop of long‐standing abuses situated in research conducted from the eyes of the colonizer (Lomawaima, 2000), decolonizing methodologies emerged as a way for indigenous researchers to engage in setting priorities, policies, and practices of research conducted with indigenous people (Smith, 1999). Using a range of interpretive methods, scholars focused on decolonization efforts seek to shift and unravel the tangled colonial relations of power and privilege (Styres, 2019), focusing efforts on struggles for autonomy over cultural wellbeing (Smith, 1999). Decolonizing methods are based on the concept of relational validity, meaning the researcher has obligations of accountability to participants (Tuck & Yang, 2019). More specifically and importantly, the research is undertaken by indigenous researchers for the benefit of indigenous peoples (Groh, 2018; Smith, 1999). Thus, a key component is listening, from the research design through to the dissemination of knowledge and information. A fundamental principle of decolonizing methodologies is that the research should not cause harm or detriment to the indigenous community, but should rather be of benefit or “give back” (Groh, 2018; Kovach, 2009). This involves listening and being responsive to what research is constructive for indigenous communities and taking care to ensure ethical practices within this setting. Ensuring ethical practices involves more than gaining approval from university ethics committees; for example, usual concerns about individual consent and confidentiality do not consider broader issues of ensuring the protection of indigenous knowledge, as well as community rights over intellectual and cultural property (Smith, 1999). Many indigenous communities have a history of oral traditions, which can extend to the wind, sea, and spiritual, whereby cultural knowledge is passed down to younger generations. This knowledge is often considered sacred, and so researchers not only need to consider what research topic is beneficial, but also what questions should and should not be asked (see, e.g., Kovach, 2009). As one such approach to decolonization, we provide an overview of the Culture‐centered Approach (CCA) to communication (Dutta, 2004).

Culture‐centered Approach The CCA to communication begins with the recognition that the erasure of voices on the margins is situated amid broader material inequalities (Dutta, 2004, 2018). Drawing on the notion that the subaltern is marked by her erasure from pathways of mobility (Guha, 1999), the CCA asks: How do interpretive methods work toward building communicative infrastructures for listening to subaltern voices so they matter? This notion of mattering is central to  the  CCA, guiding the work of interpretation in identifying features of structures that erase,  and simultaneously, exploring positive methods for transforming these structures so

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s­ubaltern  voices are recognized and represented. Attending to communication inequalities, the ­ inequalities in the distribution of communicative infrastructures for voice, the CCA ­suggests that the erasure of opportunities for listening to subaltern voices is tied to the disenfranchisement of the subaltern from material resources. The intertwined relationship between the symbolic and the material is reflected in the infrastructures for listening to subaltern voices. The erasure of subaltern voices from the spaces of recognition and representation constitutes the erasure from structures of claims‐making to material resources. Subaltern voice, recognized and represented through intentional listening, offers opportunities for transforming material inequalities in the distribution of resources. Consider, for instance, how the voices of sex workers organized under the umbrella of the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC) in Sonagachi disrupt the inequalities in the organizing of health resources (Basu & Dutta, 2008). Infrastructures of listening to the voices of sex workers offer an alternative rationality for organizing HIV/AIDS ­interventions. In other words, listening as an interpretive device foregrounds alternative meanings and conceptual frameworks, which serve as anchors to alternative theorizing. Similarly, in neoliberal Singapore, the voices of communities living in poverty build registers for listening to articulations of poverty and inequality, disrupting the neoliberal tropes circulated by the state through authoritarian techniques (Tan, Kaur‐Gill, Dutta, & Venkataraman, 2017). In contrast to listening as erasure and impossibility, listening as an act of witnessing registers voice, particularly the voices of the erased margins. The condition of subalternity, of being erased from hegemonic discursive spaces, is produced by communicative processes, frameworks, and tools (Guha, 1999). How then can ethnographic accounts listen to the voices of the colonized, raced, classed, and/or gendered subaltern? Through the act of listening, subaltern voice comes to be recognized and represented, disrupting the practices of erasure. In listening to the voices of individuals, families, and communities that have experienced trauma from wars, murders, tortures, rapes, and genocides, communicative anchors for sense‐making and interpretation are built.

Neoliberal Co‐optation

Amid the large‐scale global inequalities, the performance of listening has turned into a tool of co‐optation. Neoliberalism reflects the dominant global ideology of the free market that privileges private capital while simultaneously undermining public participatory spaces. Through programs of engagement, community participation, and community development, hegemonic actors often communicate the image of listening while precisely working to erase the voices of the margins (Dutta, 2018). The CCA therefore takes a critical stance to engagement, raising attention to the location of the infrastructures of listening. Where the infrastructures of listening are located, who shapes the agendas of these infrastructures, and the rules guiding them form the basis for interpreting how listening works in a particular context. Ongoing empirical work suggests that sovereign control of the margins over communicative infrastructures is integral to listening to the voices of the margins (Dutta & Thaker, 2019).

Reflexivity

The co‐optive nature of global hegemony in deploying listening tools to silence voices calls for developing habits of ongoing reflexivity in culture‐centered processes. Reflecting on the position one occupies as a researcher and the privileges tied to that position creates opportunities for continually interrogating the erasures in interpretive approaches. How the various levels of decisions get made within an interpretive research design, for instance, are subject to reflexivity, focusing on the workings of power and the ways in which power shapes interpretations.



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Building Infrastructures

Culture‐centered interventions seek to build infrastructures for listening to subaltern voices. The recognition of the erasure of subaltern voices becomes the basis for building listening infrastructures that foreground subaltern meanings. The ownership of these infrastructures by subaltern communities places at the forefront and circulates subaltern meanings in hegemonic spaces, disrupting the erasure. For instance, narratives of poverty and the experiences of hunger negotiated by the poor often disrupt the hegemonic narratives of progress and development narrated by the state‐corporate interests (Tan et al., 2017). Infrastructures of listening that are owned by the margins in an increasingly unequal world offer transformative resources for addressing the underlying material inequalities as well as creating pathways for imagining alternative futures beyond the ambits of global techno‐capital (Dutta, 2018).

Embodied Solidarity

The challenge to the hegemonic structures that create and reproduce silence emerges from the collective agenda of subaltern communities. Embodied solidarity, placing the body on the line alongside the struggles of other subaltern communities, forms the basis for building collective structures for listening across spaces. The contextually embedded nature of listening alongside its universal anchors for structural transformation guide the framework of solidarity incorporated into the research process. In sum, listening forms a core element of the CCA. Through listening, subaltern voices emerge into the mainstream. Listening as an interpretive anchor creates the discursive opening for subaltern voices to emerge.

Conclusion Interpretation and listening are deeply intertwined. The range of interpretive methods reviewed in this chapter attends to the complexities of listening and the ways in which the tenets of listening shape the development of interpretive methods. Each method reviewed draws attention to the role of listening as a concept that guides the research method. In addition, amid large‐scale global crises like health inequality, displacement, and climate change, creating new anchors for interpretive frames is critical to addressing these challenges. As seen in the threads of scholarship in indigenous methods and the CCA, how best to build interpretive methods that listen to the voices of the erased margins lies at the heart of addressing the challenges of resource consolidation and environmental crisis. Through these experiments in listening, new imaginaries for the generation of alternative knowledge claims can be seeded.

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4

Empirical Approaches Andrea J. Vickery

Research is not an isolated endeavor. Rather, research programs represent discourse ­communities with shared values, norms, and practices (Bavelas, 1987; Huff, 1998). As scholars often do not recognize or acknowledge the underlying assumptions guiding their inquiry, this chapter briefly introduces the philosophical background and guiding practices of reporting, experimental, and observational listening research. Examples drawn from contemporary listening research are used as illustrations, bringing to life the importance of these modes of inquiry in listening research. Common challenges in these methods are briefly noted and ­recommendations offered for designing quality research.

Philosophical Background Listening researchers who employ reporting, experimental, and observational practices are most often described as social scientists. As such, their work is empirical in nature. As a philosophy, empiricism acknowledges how knowledge is connected to experience and shaped by the experiences people have with the world (Blackburn, 2016). Empirical perspectives on listening, then, recognize that people gain knowledge about listening through sensory experiences in the world (see Lipari, this volume), but also that people can gain knowledge about listening through observing and asking about the experiences of others. Thus, knowledge claims about listening should be grounded in data obtained through either direct observation or by obtaining self‐reported perceptions (see Bodie, 2018; Bodie & Jones, 2018). Key to all social scientific methods is verisimilitude, or the degree to which our understanding of the social world aligns with reality. For example, we might posit that listeners who make eye contact will be judged as more competent. As a lay theorist, you could simply make that claim and go about your day, assuming it to be true and thus making eye contact with your many interlocutors throughout the day. As a scientist, however, you need to test this claim (often phrased as a hypothesis) with data (here, observations of the degree of eye contact between people, perhaps using an experimental design). Reflecting ideas offered by Karl Popper (1959/2002), a hypothesis about eye contact is testable, or falsifiable (you could find it not to be true); thus it is possible we generate a result inconsistent with our theory (that eye contact is a key component of listening competence). Importantly, the process of scientific The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

56 Vickery reasoning and knowledge production is an iterative process involving small, incremental steps (Hayes, 2005). We could just accept something because we believe it to be so, but scientists raise questions of what we know and continue to test and investigate these assumptions, even as they make room for probability and uncertainty. To generate hypotheses, scientists utilize three forms of logical reasoning (Pierce, 1877). Inductive reasoning happens when a researcher conducts a thorough literature review and concludes that because past research has reported X, X is therefore generally the case. For  ­instance, Pearcey and Draper’s (2008) inductive analysis concluded that because of ­student nursing reporting, tasks like paperwork are frequently prioritized above developing interpersonal relationships with patients. Deductive reasoning is used when a scientist derives a hypothesis from an existing theory. For example, Bodie, Cannava, and Vickery (2016) found little support for Polanyi’s (1985) theory of the adequate paraphrase, showing instead that messages that repeat what a speaker has said were most helpful when they indicate “common knowledge between the storyteller and listener” (p. 171). This finding also highlights the role of abductive reasoning: developing novel explanations from newly collected data. In our case, what is the best explanation for certain (unexpected) forms of paraphrasing being rated as more helpful? We speculated that “when messages contain crucial contextualizing information, they create a sense of understanding or empathy even without mention of feelings” (p. 171). Such speculation can then be incorporated into a larger theory of what constitutes an adequate paraphrase and retested in subsequent work. Indeed, discovery through the scientific method generates some answers, but it often raises more questions than initially tested.

What Do Empirical Listening Scholars Do? Regardless of the specific goals being pursued or modes of reasoning being employed by any single study, empirical scholars share a commitment to theory. Scientific theory, more formally stated, is “a set of interrelated constructs (concepts), definitions, and propositions that presents a systematic view of phenomena by specifying relationships among variables, with the purpose of explaining and predicting phenomena” (Kerlinger, 1986, p. 9). And while scientific theories vary in what they explain, they share common evaluative criteria including: organization, explanation, elegance, testability, and accuracy (Bodie, 2009). Scientific theory is one way to organize what we know about listening that focuses on explaining “why” – why do certain listening responses generate (or not) certain outcomes, for instance. The best listening theories provide explanations in the most elegant way possible, balancing the complexity of the social world with a need for simplicity. And as already mentioned, these explanations need to be testable and ultimately match reality. As they go about deriving and testing theory, often through scientific methods, empirical listening scholars must measure the variables that represent constructs of interest. Constructs are abstract, representing postulated attributes or characteristics often developed and defined within a theoretical framework (Hayes, 2005). In our paraphrasing example, for instance, there are countless ways to represent “restating what another has said” (Bodie et al., 2016, p. 167). Our team decided to operationalize (to define the measurement of) paraphrasing using a framework developed by Polanyi (1985). This framework included four types of paraphrases: event (E; what happened), durative descriptive information (DDI; background information), evaluative information (EI; emotional information), and the adequate paraphrase (combined message of E  ­ +  DDI  +  EI). Likewise, we had to operationalize “­evaluation” – the specific judgments we cared about that paraphrasing is supposed to impact. After they were exposed to one or more forms of paraphrasing, participants evaluated these ­messages for their perceived helpfulness, sensitivity, and supportiveness (p. 169).



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The specifics of our operationalizations are less important here than the general point – to study some aspect of listening you must derive a way to measure (or represent) it in the study. Another measurement concern for empirical scholars is reliability – the extent to which measures are free from random response error (Hayes, 2005). Measures that are full of random response error – that is, there is little consistency across people or administrations – reduces confidence in the results, which is related to another guiding assumption, validity. In its most general sense, validity refers to the accuracy of conclusions drawn or inferences made in research (Cronbach & Meehl, 1955; Shadish, Cook, & Campbell, 2002). Validity is multidimensional, consisting of two broad types: measurement validity and design validity. Measurement validity references the extent to which measures accurately assess the construct under question. In our paraphrase study, did our assessment of helpfulness, for instance, accurately capture what we conceptually defined as helpful? Under measurement validity, listening scholars are concerned with predictive, concurrent, content, and construct validity (Bodie & Worthington, 2018). Design validity is how sure we can be about the results of our, usually experimental, study. The paraphrase study manipulated four elements of how people restate others, and thus one might question whether our results can be attributed to real differences in paraphrasing; it is always possible that any differences we found (or lack thereof) are simply an artifact of our operationalization or other aspects of our design. When talking about things within a study, scholars usually reference internal validity, or whether the researcher actually measured what they intended to measure. Especially relevant for experimental designs, scholars want to make arguments that the stimulus caused the observed effect to occur (Campbell, 1957). In addition, scholars are concerned with external validity, or the generalizability and representativeness of their findings (Campbell, 1957). Scholars want the answers to questions and hypotheses they tested within a sample to represent patterns and findings which apply to others not included in the current sample (i.e., the population of interest). In our paraphrase study, it would be nice to say that certain forms of paraphrasing are more helpful than others. Unfortunately, we cannot make that claim for all people in all kinds of situations. First, the population to which we are able to generalize is college students, and if we are being true to the design, generalizable to students who enroll in introductory Communication Studies courses at Louisiana State University (where the study was conducted). Second, our method involved vignettes – participants were asked to read about a stressful situation, imagine experiencing it, and then rate how helpful certain messages were likely to be. Thus, we cannot extrapolate to real‐world stressors or those that were not represented in our three situation prompts. Issues of external validity are ultimately about how social scientists can make generalizable claims about a population from data collected on a sample. A population is the entire group of units you wish to study; often, populations in listening research comprise a group like “American adults” or “Children enrolled in elementary school.” Yet, populations can also include digital or physical artifacts including newspaper stories, books, blog entries, photos, or  tweets. Sampling involves selecting from the population a group of units in which ­characteristics or qualities of interest are estimated and measured (Daniel, 2011). Commonly, ­people  –  their experiences, characteristics, and qualities  –  constitute samples in empirical listening research. But scholars who use experimental methods (like we did in the paraphrase study) also sample from populations of other units (in the paraphrase study, all possible messages that restate another’s speech). Sampling is an important process in empirical research because the quality of statistical and general argument in a given study depend on how the sample was collected as well as the size of the sample (Cohen, 1985; Lenth, 2001), again relating to the goal of accurately representing the real world in the given study. In order to make inferences from a sample to a population, scholars utilize inferential statistics (Tabachnick & Fidell, 2007). Inferential statistics allow judgments of probability,

58 Vickery including the likelihood of finding the patterns reported from a sample in the larger population. In addition, social scientists utilize descriptive statistics to summarize numerical information about the sample or variables (e.g., mean scores, reliability estimates; Hayes, 2005). These latter values tell interesting stories about collected data, allowing researchers to numerically and graphically summarize large datasets. The hypotheses and questions tested in a given study are supported (or refuted) through the summarized and inferred numerical reasoning, with both descriptive and inferential statistics appearing in reporting, experimental, and observational methods.

Reporting, Experimental, and Observational Methods This section reviews how reporting, experimental, and observational methods are specifically employed by listening scholars. Design choices from exemplar research investigations are highlighted, providing real‐life examples of how they are employed to study listening. Although reporting, experimental, and observational methods have distinct choices and procedures, scholars can (and should) combine these procedures to design sophisticated studies to advance listening knowledge; indeed, many of the reports highlighted combine such procedures to design quality research studies. I invite readers to read the reports referenced in this chapter in their entirety to illuminate the connections between reporting, experimental, and observational studies.

Reporting Methods Reporting is the most common method used by listening scholars (Keaton & Bodie, 2013); with scholars focusing primarily on exploring self‐assessed listening dispositions. For example, Worthington (2005) explored how individual differences in listening styles (how people tend to process information) co‐vary with verbal aggressiveness (the tendency to engage or attack the self‐concept of others). She found verbal aggressiveness inversely associated with content‐ and people‐centered listening styles. Other scholars have used reporting methods to explore judgments of listeners, either “in general” (i.e., trait measures) or after a specific listening situation (i.e., state measures). Using both these methods, Bodie, Jones, Vickery, Hatcher, and Cannava (2014) collected self‐reported trait‐like representations of active‐empathic listening (e.g., “I am sensitive to what others are not saying”) from target participants and also collected state‐like other‐reports where a conversational partner evaluated the target participants (e.g., “My conversational partner is sensitive to what others are not saying”). Such a choice to include both self‐ and other‐reports strengthens arguments for construct validity and internal validity as accuracy and consistency can be assessed in how someone reports on their own perceptions and how another person evaluates the same target participant, but other‐reports can also be used without collecting reports from the target being evaluated. For instance, Weger (2018) collected other reports of instructor active‐empathic listening without measuring the instructor’s self‐reported active‐empathic listening. As these studies illustrate, researchers must carefully consider several questions representing common assumptions guiding the empirical methods: who is included (sampling), what is being measured (operationalization, variables, construct validity), along with when, how, and where these procedures take place (internal and external validity). Readers are encouraged to consult numerous resources compiling these practices and procedures (for instance, Frey, Botan, & Kreps, 2000; Kerlinger, 1986), though a summary is included here to get you started.



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The Who of Reporting

Researchers must carefully consider who they will ask to report on listening. The purpose of most report‐based research is to make inferences at the level of the population (Hayes, 2005) – to make generalizations about some aspect of listening. For example, if researchers seek to understand perceptions of the listening culture at a specific organization with 500 managers, 6,000 full‐time employees, and 2,000 part‐time employees, all 8,500 employees would represent the population of this organization. Although possible, it is unlikely to obtain a full census of all 8,500 employees. Instead, a researcher would take a reasonable (and hopefully random) sample of this population. Based on a standard level of certainty (95% confidence level) and margin of error (3%), this researcher would select a sample of approximately 1,000 employees, from which claims would be made about the organization’s listening culture (e.g., Team Listening Environment; Johnston & Reed, 2018). How many people to include in a sample relates to the planned inferential analyses, because the ability to detect the predicted effects and relations depends on the size of the sample (Cohen, 1985).

The What and How of Reporting

Researchers must also consider what they are measuring in their reports of listening. For instance, researchers might ask people to report on what they think about listening (Janusik, 2007), their relatively consistent preferences for interpersonal listening (Worthington, 2005), or their tendencies to engage in active‐empathic listening when sensing, processing, and responding to others’ verbal and nonverbal messages (Bodie et al., 2014). Other what representations in the reporting of listening might include assessing evaluations of listening. For instance, participants could be asked to assess active listening, gauging the importance or quality of active listening. Participants could also be asked to report on the use of active listening, engaging in retrospective recollection of past listening behaviors. Self‐report methods are typically best suited to answer questions about participants’ perceptions of listening and quite ill‐suited to answer questions about how they behave (Bodie, 2018). Researchers designing reporting studies have to also consider how they will measure listening, capturing the process of operationalization and measurement introduced earlier. The importance of deciding how to measure listening cannot be understated. For instance, the construct active listening has been operationalized with the Active Listening Attitude Scale, Active Listening Observation Scale, and Active‐Empathic Listening Scale, all detailed in the Sourcebook of Listening Research (Worthington & Bodie, 2018b). Which measure is most appropriate depends on the specifics of the research study. Moreover, some studies may require modification to meet the research goals of a given study (e.g., AELS self‐report to AELS other‐report; see Bodie, 2011; Bodie et al., 2014).

The When of Reporting

Researchers designing reporting studies must also consider when reports are gathered from study participants. When researchers collect reports on listening and related constructs at a single point in time, it is described as a cross‐sectional design. In contrast, a longitudinal study would measure listening at more than one point in time. Longitudinal designs can involve different sampling techniques related to panel, cohort, or trend designs (Brewer, 2000); additionally, procedural choices must also be made about the timing of the reporting as reports can be requested at set time intervals (e.g., every month) or requested when specific events occur (e.g., event sampling; see Reis & Gable, 2000). Flora, Roch, and Levorato (2014) read stories to 156 children, then administered the Test for Listening Comprehension, and then repeated these procedures at a second point in time a few months after the first meeting. This study employed a panel design – collecting reports at a set time interval of seven months between time one and time two from the same group of children. Longitudinal reporting designs

60 Vickery afford researchers the ability to gather evidence of changes over time. Yet attrition, when participants drop out and do not complete subsequent reports, is a concern in longitudinal studies (Gustavson, von Soest, Karevold, & Røysamb, 2012). Through attrition, randomly selected samples begin to resemble non‐randomly selected samples (Goodman & Bloom, 1996), and the statistical power of a sample may be impacted (Cohen, 1985). These challenges may explain why longitudinal designs are relatively uncommon in listening research (Keaton & Bodie, 2013), but this does not negate the need for longitudinal research.

The Where of Reporting

Reporting procedures can be completed in various modes. Commonly, reporting methodology will feature self‐administered questionnaires (Visser, Krosnick, & Lavrakas, 2000), which participants complete with a pen and paper or electronically. Researchers often ask participants to complete their questionnaires in a supervised location like a campus computer lab or office to ensure its prompt return and a generally consistent experience across participants in the study. In most reporting studies, the primary interest is with uncovering associations between listening and other social phenomena. Such designs have been called ex post‐facto or correlational designs because researchers observe simultaneously occurring patterns of variation, but do not directly interfere or change the presence or absence of a variable (Silva, 2010). While reporting methodologies have many benefits, concerns emerge if researchers seek evidence of causation. Next, I introduce experimental design, which when done well, can begin to answer questions of causality.

Experimental Methods Unlike reporting studies, experimental methods involve intentionally manipulating an aspect of the environment to observe the effect on some outcome of interest. Here, different types of experimental designs are briefly introduced; I also outline salient features of design, measurement, and sampling commonly appearing in experimental research investigating listening (see Campbell & Stanley, 1963; Shadish et al., 2002, for a fuller treatment of experimental design). Before introducing the basics of experiments, the importance of variables in measuring listening is explored (see Bodie & Worthington, 2018).

Variables: A Briefer

Often, when researchers describe variables, they classify them based on predictions made in a hypothesis. Dependent variables represent outcomes of interest, while independent variables are thought to share an association or influence on the dependent variable. Reporting studies, of course, investigate patterns between independent and dependent variables (e.g., independent variable of gender and dependent variable of listening styles; see Sargent & Weaver, 2003), but so‐called correlational research designs do not afford the same control over independent and dependent variables as do experimental studies.

Experimental Basics

Unlike reporting studies, experimental methods allow researchers to explore and test questions involving causation. Specifically, experimental studies ensure that not only are the independent and dependent variables empirically associated, but that this association is temporally contingent (i.e., change in the independent variable occurs before change in the dependent variable) and non spurious (i.e., identifying and eliminating alternative explanations or other variables that actually account for the observed association; Shadish et al., 2002). In experimental studies, listening can be operationalized as the independent variable, what is



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experimentally induced, or the dependent variable, the effects observed after induction. For instance, Trahan and Rockwell (1999) assessed nursing home residents’ satisfaction with workers’ listening behaviors (dependent variable) after the workers received communication skills training (independent variable). In contrast, Bridgett and Cuevas (2000) had students listen to ten minutes of classical music (independent variable) or remain in silence (control) before taking a math test (dependent variable). In an experiment, researchers observe what happens when people receive a treatment. What they really want to know, however, is the counterfactual, or knowledge of what would have happened to those same people if they simultaneously had not received treatment. What researchers refer to as an effect is the difference between what did happen and what would have happened. Of course, we can never truly know this. Thus, a central task in all experimental research is to create reasonable approximations to the physical impossibility of knowing a counterfactual. Experimental researchers attempt to approximate the counterfactual through one of three primary designs. Pre‐experimental designs do not include a control group, the group whose results are compared to the experimental group. Because these designs do not provide information about the counterfactual, they are generally used to demonstrate the effect as a justification for a more thorough experimental study (Campbell & Stanley, 1963). Pre‐experimental designs include the one‐shot case study, the one group pretest‐posttest design, and the static group comparison design (Campbell & Stanley, 1963). The previously mentioned study by Trahan and Rockwell (1999) used a one group pretest‐posttest design. All employees took part in the skills training, meaning there is no way to compare results on the dependent variable (ratings of listening satisfaction) for employees who did not receive training, clearly a limitation of pre‐experimental designs. A better approximation to the counterfactual is found in quasi‐experimental and true experimental designs. Both quasi‐ and true experiments involve at least one control group and at least one experimental group. That is, researchers do something to the experimental group, while doing nothing to the control group. The inclusion of a control group begins to approximate the counterfactual because researchers can see what happens when something happens, as well as what happens when something does not happen. True experimental designs feature specific procedures which approximate the counterfactual through random assignment. Random assignment also helps researchers rule out the possibility that some characteristic of all people in one group actually explains the observed effect. Random assignment to an experimental condition is what differentiates a true from a quasi‐experiment. The most common use of the quasi‐experimental design in listening research is to use intact classes and administer test protocol to groups of students (see Keaton & Bodie, 2013). For instance, Skinner, Robinson, Sterling, and Goodman (1999) “attended each class at their scheduled time and ran the [experimental] procedures” (p. 101) which included playing a fast, medium, or slow version of a radio advertisement; the dependent variables of interest were product ratings, speaker ratings, and accuracy of recall. Other work, although often recruiting from the self‐same classes (usually Communication Studies courses), invites participants to a set laboratory time, administers protocol one‐person‐at‐a‐time, and thus is able to randomly assign people to groups (e.g., Bodie et al., 2016; Weger, Castle, & Emmett, 2010).

The Who of Experiments

Like in reporting studies, listening researchers must make decisions about how to recruit and retain participants in their study. Unlike survey‐based research, the purpose of which is often to make a population inference, “a numerical statement about a population by generalizing a statistical description of the data in the sample to the population from which the sample was derived,” experimental research is more often used to ascertain a process inference, “whether the study helps to illuminate the process that is producing the effect observed” (Hayes, 2005,

62 Vickery p. 33). Making process inferences means researchers care less about random sampling; the main concern is with random assignment to condition. But the ability of an experimental design to help infer about the strength of an effect in the population (i.e., external validity) depends heavily on having samples that represent the population. Thus, experimental researchers must balance concerns about random sampling and random assignment, depending on what types of inferences they want to draw. Another who question researchers must consider relates to the use of confederates – people who participate in experiments, but are not actually the participants being observed by the researcher. Confederates are trained to behave in specific ways, typically to induce experimental listening stimuli. Ideally, participants are unaware that they are interacting with a confederate (Lambertz‐Berndt, 2017). For example, Weger et al. (2010) trained undergraduate students to act like student interviewers to elicit paraphrasing or generic responses. Similarly, Bodie, Vickery, Cannava, and Jones (2015) featured confederates recruited from a campus counseling program and trained to respond with active listening behaviors (e.g., open questions, paraphrasing, reflections, assumption checking). These confederates were then instructed to act like they were undergraduate students completing the study for course credit when they showed up at the appointment. One strength of using confederates in listening studies is the ability to more consistently manipulate listening behaviors and to allow study participants a relatively standard experience. At the same time, there is the risk that participants may discover they are being deceived and subsequently change or modify their behaviors accordingly (Lambertz‐Berndt, 2017).

The What of Experiments

The operationalization of listening is an important part of experimental studies in listening, in line with the concerns of reliability and validity in measurement. Researchers must decide if listening is measured as either an independent or dependent variable. As an independent variable, participants may watch a video observing listeners engaging in listening behavior (Bodie & Jones, 2012), or they may be asked to listen to an audio recording before completing posttest measures (Bridgett & Cuevas, 2000; Skinner et al., 1999). Or, listening may be operationalized as the observed effect in an experiment, measuring nursing home residents’ satisfaction with workers’ listening after the workers received skills‐based training (Trahan & Rockwell, 1999), or capturing participant evaluations of active‐empathic listening after participants watched a recording of a listener in a supportive conversation (Bodie & Jones, 2012).

The How and When of Experiments

The goals of a study direct decisions about how to conduct an experiment and when to measure variables. How to represent listening depends on the choices in design (covered already), as well as how listening is conceptually defined and thus operationalized, both in terms of any experimental inductions as well as measurement choices (e.g., when listening is the dependent variable). When listening is measured also relates to design choices. If listening is evaluated as an experimental outcome, it would be measured, at minimum, after the experimental induction using a posttest measure. If listening is part of the experimental stimuli, listening should be experimentally induced before measuring any effects or outcomes. Similar to reporting measures, measured variables like posttest evaluations may be completed immediately following the event but may also involve longitudinal collection procedures.

The Where of Experiments

Listening researchers certainly utilize laboratory spaces, but experiments also can be ­conducted in field settings (Bakeman, 2000). Bodie and his research team situated their experimental investigations of the effects of supportive listening in a laboratory setting



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(Bodie et al., 2014, 2015), which was furnished with a couch, a computer desk, a table with chairs, and comfortable décor (paintings, fake plants, end tables); cameras were mounted unobtrusively. Participant conversations were video‐recorded and later analyzed for visual and verbal content. One concern about laboratory environments for experiments, however, is often the ecological validity of the design and procedures. Ecological validity captures the generalizability of the study’s procedures and findings to settings common in everyday life (Wegener & Blankenship, 2007). For example, Itzchakov, Kluger, and Castro (2017; Study 3) used a flickering computer screen to serve as an experimental distraction in a study of quality listening, noting that it “resembled typical distractions in daily interactions, such as by smart phones and TV sets” (p. 111). Ecological validity is a concern for where and how the experiment takes place, but is also of concern in what qualities of listening are represented in the study. Experimental inductions of listening, if not carefully designed, may not fully represent listening: Listeners engage in behaviors beyond paraphrasing (Weger et  al., 2010), and observational methods may offer some clarity on the ecological validity of measuring listening in studies.

Observational Methods Briefly, in an observational study, researchers focus on capturing, collecting, and studying observable behaviors associated with listening (Bodie, 2018). Observational methods can be combined with reporting and experimental studies: Fassaert and colleagues recorded actual physician–patient conversations to capture physician active listening behaviors. In addition to recording these conversations, the research team collected self‐ and other‐reports from patients evaluating the conversation (Fassaert, van Dulmen, Schellevis, & Bensing, 2007; Fassaert, van Dulmen, Schellevis, van der Jagt, & Bensing, 2008). Like reporting and experimental methods, myriad resources exist to help guide the design of observational methods (e.g., Bakeman, 2000; Bodie, 2018).

The Who of Observational Studies

Researchers must consider who they are observing and whether those individuals know the purposes of the observation. One concern in observation is that participants may intentionally or unintentionally modify their behavior when taking part in a study (e.g., the Hawthorne effect; Colman, 2015). This concern is not unique to observational studies; it also is of concern in reporting studies (e.g., when participants report how they think a researcher wants rather than their actual attitudes) and experimental studies (e.g., when participants act differently in a lab compared to “real” life). Nevertheless, researchers can, and should, design observational studies such that participants are informed of general procedures, but researchers may wait to fully reveal study purposes in a debriefing session (Henningsen, 2017). For all studies, ethical considerations must be made to ensure participants are informed of the nature of the study, but these ethical considerations become especially apparent in studies involving behavioral observations.

The What of Observational Studies

Researchers also make decisions about what listening behaviors are represented and what information will be known about these behaviors. For instance, do researchers wish to capture the complete absence of a behavior like asking questions? If so, researchers may wish to capture the exact number of questions asked, including zero. Researchers may wish to rate behaviors into relative levels, capturing if eye gaze occurred “not at all,” “sometimes,” “most of the time,” or “all of the time” in an interaction (McKechnie et al., 2007). These choices relate to how listening will be measured in an observational study.

64 Vickery

The How of Observational Studies

Researchers using observational methods must consider how listening behaviors will be observed. Direct observation means that researchers will be able to see and observe listening directly as it unfolds in real time (Frey et al., 2000). An example of direct observation is found in McKechnie et al. (2007), where one fieldworker acted as a mystery shopper in a busy outdoor mall. This fieldworker interacted with various retail service providers while another fieldworker stood out of the service providers’ line of vision and classified the frequency of the service providers’ listening actions including eye contact and nodding. Indirect observation involves observing behavior from artifacts including, but not limited to, video recordings, transcripts, diary entries, computer‐mediated messages, books, and other preserved materials (Bolger, Davis, & Rafaeli, 2003; Frey et al., 2000). Indirect observation of listening often involves video‐ (or audio‐) recording followed by subsequent coding of listening behaviors from these recordings (Bodie et al., 2014, 2015; Bavelas, Coates, & Johnson, 2002; Fassaert et al., 2007, 2008). One strength of these indirect methods is the increased ability to train coders and assess intercoder reliability (Bakeman, 2000; Hayes & Krippendorf, 2007). The importance of intercoder reliability in social scientific circles may reveal why researchers more often employ indirect observation. That does not mean consistency in measurement is not available for direct observations – observers could be trained, and then multiple observers could be present and watch the same interaction, and their responses compared for consistency. Nevertheless, procedures for coding are often more easily planned and executed with indirect observation. Moreover, recorded conversations can be coded using multiple schemes as findings reveal nuanced patterns than may have been initially unexpected (e.g., Bavelas, 1987).

The Where and When of Observational Studies

Researchers designing observational studies also must decide the environment in which listening will be observed and measured, or where listening will be observed and measured. Observations, like experiments, can be situated in field or laboratory settings (Bakeman, 2000). Field settings situate listening observations in a specific ecological environment. For instance, McKechnie et  al. (2007) situated their observations in a retail shopping environment. Laboratory settings situate listening observations in a controlled environment, like the work of Bavelas (Bavelas et al., 2000, 2002) and Bodie (Bodie et al., 2014, 2015). Observing listening may, at first glance, appear to be as simple as going outside and watching people engage in conversation. Yet for this research to be representative and generalizable, researchers must make choices related to how listening is being observed, what is being measured, and the procedures used to study specific questions and hypotheses, just like when designing reporting and experimental studies.

Conclusion With so much to know about listening and so many empirical methods available for advancing this knowledge, there is a balance to be struck between doing research and doing quality research. Of utmost concern to listening scholars should be accurately representing listening. Listening scholars face the additional challenge that defining listening is not a straightforward task. As the Introduction to this volume shows, there are at least as many definitions of listening as there are chapters in this volume! Defining and measuring are guiding assumptions in the doing of empirical listening research. One viable way to meet the challenge of what to measure in listening is to “Think theory first.” Theories, by definition, offer frameworks for defining, describing, and understanding the interrelation of social phenomena (Bodie, 2009; Worthington & Bodie, 2018b). Thinking theory first helps to conceptualize listening in ways that are guided by underlying principles



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and help to make sense of the world including contradictory findings (Bodie, 2009, 2013). While the development, testing, and refinement of theory is part of the scientific process (Hayes, 2005), few empirical investigations of listening are informed by distinct theoretical frameworks (Janusik, 2007). Yet, listening scholars have been advocating for the need for a shared commitment to theory in the listening research community for quite some time now (Bodie, 2009, 2013; Bodie, Worthington, Imhof, & Cooper, 2008; Wolvin, Halone, & Coakley, 1999; Worthington & Bodie, 2018a, 2018b). The alternative to thinking theory first is to “think measures first.” While thinking measures first may yield testable predictions and hypotheses, this process can perpetuate the abundance of cross‐sectional reporting studies without returning to understanding and contextualization of research findings as a whole. How listening is defined in theory can guide what representations of listening are needed in the measurement part of empirical research (Worthington & Bodie, 2018b). Existing theories of human behavior offer insights on how to conceptualize the listening processes (e.g., Affection Exchange Theory; see Floyd, 2014). High quality research involves following standard social scientific design and reporting practices, which current listening research often fails to meet. Reported by Keaton and Bodie (2013), of all empirical research published in the International Journal of Listening between 1987 and 2011, 67.3% of samples featured college students, 82.7% of samples involved U.S. participants, and 25.5% of samples featured intact classes (i.e., all participants were students enrolled in the same course at the same time). The use of college students as participants in studies is not wholly unfounded or inappropriate nor is an American population or utilizing intact classes in a quasi‐experimental design. When seeking evidence for (or against) theoretical claims (i.e., when seeking to make a process inference; Hayes, 2005), college student samples are perfectly legitimate places to start. But, studies testing statistical comparisons of samples suggest college student samples yield different effect sizes than non‐college student samples (Peterson, 2001), and suggest some differences in the homogeneity of samples for college students versus non‐college students (Hanel & Vione, 2016). At present, most of these studies comparing college student samples and non‐college student samples do not directly test listening constructs, but rather other social processes. Listening researchers designing quality research studies can sample from college students, but their use should be justified along with other decisions. For instance, when deciding on whether to use intact samples, researchers should consider approximating random sampling on campuses (Cohen, 1985; Daniel, 2011) including the use of campus participation pools (“Sona systems”, n.d.), network sampling procedures (Visser et al., 2000), and collaboration across departments or institutions to collect samples (see Bodie & Jones, 2012). Coupled with this recommendation, readers should also review the list of better design and measurement practices outlined in Keaton and Bodie (2013) and other sources to ensure information about the sample and other descriptive and inferential statistics conform to formatting conventions and expectations to tell the full story of the goals and results of the study (Bodie, 2013). Studying listening as a social phenomenon recognizes that without people, research questions and hypotheses would remain untested; they would be mere conjecture. Thus, it is important to recognize the importance of people in all aspects of research. There are people involved in the hard work of theory and measurement development, the institutional review boards reviewing studies to ensure minimal risks for participants, the actual participants of the study, the coders and (often graduate and undergraduate student) researchers helping to run studies and analyze data, the editors and reviewers who read the manuscripts, and the readers who engage with the final written report. Engaging with people in all steps of the research process – from conceptualization to sharing the final written report – helps to strengthen the quality of listening research. Ultimately, the process of research can be viewed as a conversation among many important players (Huff, 1998), the end product of which showcases only a small slice of what Bavelas

66 Vickery (1987) labeled a creative process. This chapter has presented ways researchers have designed studies to represent and understand listening to engage that creative and curious process. It is my hope that you see this ending as a beginning, one where you transform from reader to researcher, designing your own quality reporting, experimental, or observational study to advance listening knowledge about the questions and experiences you observe as a listener.

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68 Vickery Lenth, R. V. (2001). Some practical guidelines for effective sample size determination. American Statistician, 55, 187–193. http://www.doi.org/10.1198/000313001317098149 McKechnie, D. S., Grant, J., & Bagaria, V. (2007). Observation of listening behaviors in retail ­service  encounters. Managing Service Quality: An International Journal, 17, 116–133. doi: 10.1108/09604520710735155 Pearcey, P., & Draper, P. (2008). Exploring clinical nursing experiences: Listening to student nurses. Nurse Education Today, 28, 595–601. http://www.doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2007.09.007 Peterson, R. A. (2001). On the use of college students in social science research: Insights from a second‐ order meta‐analysis. Journal of Consumer Research, 28, 450–461. http://www.doi.org/ 10.1086/323732 Pierce, C. S. (1877). The fixation of belief. Popular Science Monthly, 12, 1–15. Retrieved from http:// www.peirce.org/writings/p107.html Polanyi, L. (1985). Telling the American story: A structural and cultural analysis of conversational storytelling. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Popper, K. (1959/2002). The logic of scientific discovery. New York: Routledge. Reis, H. T., & Gable, S. L. (2000). Event‐sampling and other methods for studying everyday experience. In H. T. Reis & C. M. Judd (Eds.), Handbook of research methods in social and personality psychology (pp. 190–222). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Sargent, S. L., & Weaver III, J. B. (2003). Listening styles: Sex differences in perceptions of self and others. International Journal of Listening, 17, 5–18. http://www.doi.org/10.1080/10904018.20 03.10499052 Shadish, W. R., Cook, T. D., & Campbell, D. T. (2002). Experimental and quasi‐experimental designs for generalized causal inference. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Silva, C. N. (2010). Ex post facto study. In N. Salkind (Ed.), Encyclopedia of research design (Vol. 2, pp. 465–466). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Skinner, C. H., Robinson, D. H., Robinson S. L., Sterling, H. E., & Goodman, M. A. (1999). Effects of advertisement speech rates on feature recognition, and product and speaker ratings. International Journal of Listening, 13, 97–110. https://doi.org/10.1080/10904018.1999.10499029 Sona Systems (n.d.). “Overview.” Retrieved from https://www.sona‐systems.com/overview.aspx Tabachnick, B. G., & Fidell, L. S. (2007). Using multivariate statistics (5th ed.). New York: Pearson. Trahan, B. C., & Rockwell, P. (1999). The effects of listening training on nursing home assistants: Residents’ satisfaction with and perceptions of assistants’ listening behavior. International Journal of Listening, 13, 62–74. http://www.doi.org/10.1080/10904018.1999.10499027 Visser, P. S., Krosnick, J. A., & Lavrakas, P. A. (2000). Survey research. In H. T. Reis & C. M. Judd (Eds.), Handbook of research methods in social and personality psychology (pp. 232–252). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Wegener, D. T., & Blankenship, K. L. (2007). Ecological validity. In R. F. Baumeister & K. D. Vohs (Eds.), Encyclopedia of social psychology (pp. 275–276). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Weger, H. (2018). Instructor active empathic listening and classroom incivility. International Journal of Listening, 32, 49–64. http://www.doi.org/10.1080/10904018.2017.1289091 Weger, H., Castle, G. R., & Emmett, M. C. (2010). Active listening in peer interviews: The influence of message paraphrasing on perceptions of listening skill. International Journal of Listening, 24, 34–49. http://www.doi.org/10.1080/10904010903466311 Wolvin, A. D., Halone, K. K., & Coakley, C. G. (1999). Assessing the “intellectual discussion” on listening theory and research. International Journal of Listening, 13, 111–129. doi: 10.1080/10904018.1999.10499030 Worthington, D. L. (2005). Exploring the relationship between listening style preference and verbal aggressiveness. International Journal of Listening, 19, 3–11. http://www.doi.org/10.1080/1090 4018.2005.10499069 Worthington, D. L. & Bodie, G. D. (2018a). Defining listening: A historical, theoretical, and pragmatic assessment. In D. L. Worthington & G. D. Bodie (Eds.), Handbook of listening measures and methods (pp. 3–20). New York: Wiley. Worthington, D. L., & Bodie, G. D. (2018b). The sourcebook of listening research: Methodology and measures. New York: Wiley.

PART II

Disciplinary Foundations

This part contains 11 chapters that highlight the expansive academic landscape that is listening research. The scholarship of listening is not confined to a single discipline; rather, scholars working in multiple disciplines approach listening with distinct methods and theories, creating largely independent stores of knowledge. While most chapters review the literature from a distinct disciplinary perspective (e.g., Architecture, Philosophy), others do not. For example, as noted in the Introduction, Sound Studies is arguably best classified as a field of study, being interdisciplinary in scope. In addition, readers will notice that although each discipline (or field) provides a unique approach to the study of listening, each also shares commonalities with other disciplinary approaches.

The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Architecture Karen Van Lengen

The problems of deafness are deeper and more complex, if not more important, than those of blindness. Deafness is a much worse misfortune. For it means the loss of the most vital ­stimulus – the sound of the voice that brings language, sets thoughts astir and keeps us in the intellectual company of man. Helen Keller (1933) This comparison of sound and vision, coming from such an extraordinary person – a woman who learned to communicate without these primary senses – asks us to seriously consider the profound quality of aural perception, as a means of communicative opportunities and discoveries. It demands that we consider the sonic qualities of our spatial experiences that take place in the constructed and natural environments of our world, not only with respect to the voice, but also to the sounds of the world at large. We know that the experience of architecture is a multisensory one, yet contemporary culture challenges this design approach. First, it is important to acknowledge that since the Renaissance, architecture has been primarily devoted to the visual. This condition has been reinforced in today’s culture by the proliferation of visual software programs, web images, and media platforms that drive both architectural training and practice as well as the user’s desires. Cultural historian, Karin Bijsterveld (2008), has noted, “While seeing creates distance, focuses on the superficial, and calls on the intellect, hearing surrounds us with sounds, penetrates deep into the heart of the matter and is inclined to the affective” (p. 14). The heart of architecture is spatial, and that heart exists in the design of interior volumes of buildings and urban configurations. It is in this realm that the potential for various kinds of engagement and discovery can take place. The second challenge for designers in today’s world ironically lies in architecture’s inherent competition with new forms of communication, such as headphones, earbuds, iPhones, and iPads, which have taken people out of the public realm and into their own private communicative spaces. Such self‐imposed isolation is described by the cultural theorist Michael Bull (2006), as a type of privatization of public space, in which “we can choose what we want to hear, screening out the world to create a private auditory universe” (p. 112) . This situation has consequences with respect to the meaning of architecture and urban design. At the crux of this statement lies a deep challenge for the future of the discipline because it begs the The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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question of how we inhabit the spaces we create. How should architects design a public realm in today’s world when no one seems to be paying attention to their immediate surroundings? Sonic studies scholar Salome Voegelin (2014, p. 12) has noted: Listening as an innovative and generative practice, as a strategy of engagement that we employ deliberately to explore a different landscape other than the one framed by vision, and its cultural vision that I refer to here, grants us access to another view on the world and on the subjects living in that world.

This possibility of engagement with other view points and diverse cultural conditions is, in today’s culture, particularly significant, as it may begin to unlock the rigid forces that isolate so many cultural groups. The act of listening has so many possibilities for interactive engagement and discovery. Listening’s potential is currently miscalculated by architects whose focus continues to center on the visual; as such, its creative invention at the spatial level goes unrealized. A restorative sonic process that begins with learning to listen intentionally and attentively could begin to break this cycle and promote the richness that our constructed and natural worlds can provide (see, for example, Blesser & Salter, 2007). The act of listening could then provide the basis for more effective and conscious sonic design. This chapter is divided into four sections. The first section introduces several key historical sites that demonstrate the important relationship between sound, architecture, and meaningful social and spiritual activities. As these examples will illustrate, there is close alignment between cultural traditions and community life. The second section introduces the industrial and technological revolutions that sparked a transformational shift, not only in the construction of new building typologies and materials, but also in the sounds that emerged from these changes. In the third section, an introduction to key sound artists demonstrates important concepts in listening and in the understanding of the sonics of architectural space. The last section is devoted to the intersection of architecture, sound, and listening, noting some of the challenges of working with this sensorial aspect in the design process. The conclusion of the chapter charges the architectural profession with actively beginning to develop a sonic awareness in order to bring authenticity, communicative opportunities, and the act of discovery into architectural space and its global culture.

Sound and Architecture: A Look Back To more clearly represent the differing relationships between space and sound, it is helpful to review some key historical examples from a diversity of cultural contexts and historical time periods. These examples serve to frame the importance of sound and communicative space in specific types of buildings and community places.

Early Examples In early oral societies, primary cultural exchange and the preservation of collective memory took place in a commemorative fashion: face‐to‐face, with the rhythms and melodies of performing bards weaving their extended story lines of epic poems into coherent, communal events for their audiences (Hobart & Schiffman, 1998). These events took place in spaces that reinforced the act of listening. For example, circular spaces such as the Citadel at Mycenae (c.1250 BCE) effectively bound the voice into a contained framework and reinforced an environment for listening. This is one of many historic examples of listening spaces that supported cultural agendas. While these spaces were intentionally designed, many took advantage of natural formations; there is some evidence of sound recognition in the Paleolithic caves at

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Lascaux and Fonte‐de‐Gaume. Steven Waller, an acoustical archeologist, speculated that the aural quality of these spaces may have generated the subjects of the visual paintings and that the sonic conditions became a central part of their rituals and culture. Caves that exhibit strong echoes and actively support percussive sounds tend to have drawings of bulls, deer, and bison, while quieter caves exhibit drawings of the feline family (Waller, 2014; also see Acoustical Society, 2017). In other underground examples, we can find spaces that were intentionally designed and exhibit evidence of a clear understanding of the behavior of sound, which was directed for the purpose of ceremonial rituals. The Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum in Malta, a Neolithic necropolis, is a good example of this type. This highly articulated 500 square meter complex, believed to be a burial ground, is comprised of a series of chambers and rooms arranged on three levels. The “oracle chamber” located at the center of the second level is a unique example of a European subterranean “labyrinth type” structure from the period of 4,000 BCE to 2,500 BCE (UNESCO). Believed to have functioned as ceremonial space, this chamber acts as a ­resonating hall for the voice. When the frequency of 110 Hz1 is sung into the chamber room, the sound of the voice resonates perfectly with the space. This resonance occurs because the wavelength of 110 Hz is a multiple of the precise dimensions of the chamber, therefore ­reinforcing that one specific tone. The space also contains a niche located at the end of the chamber that, in turn, amplifies the echoes of the resonating voice. This design appears to have been intentional, creating a special space for shamans to perform ritual burial ceremonies. In 2008, neurologist Dr. Ian Cook, along with a team of University of California scientists, investigated the influence of the 110 Hz frequency on the brain. They found that when the subjects listened exclusively to the 110 Hz frequency their brain activities changed. The language processing section of the brain shut down, while the emotive and mood activity centers were activated. Ancient cultures in other regions beyond the Hypogeum may also have been aware of this phenomenon, as observed in other historic megalithic structures, such as Newgrange, Ireland (Cook et al., 2008). Western cultures were not alone in making connections between architecture and sound. In the Mayan world, there are architectural examples, which demonstrate that Mayans had a clear understanding and preference for sonic interactions with their architecture. The well‐known Temple of Kukulkan (AD 750–1200) at Chichen Itza emits a chirping sound when activated by a person clapping at the base of the 92‐tread stairway. Using a sonogram analysis, acoustician David Lubman (2008) found a striking similarity between the chirped echo effect of the stairs and the chirp of the quetzal bird, which was significant to the Mayan culture and thought to have played an important role in larger ceremonial performances of the Mayans. Lubman hypothesized that the zigzag shadow, that descends the stairway during the ceremonial time of the spring equinox, provided a visual image not unlike a feather floating down the stair. The induced chirping not only gave meaning to the descending shadow but could also be heard at other nearby Mayan sites, thus communicating this important ceremony to surrounding neighbors. Almost half a globe away, the Greek theater tradition had already taken shape. The long design lineage to perfect this outdoor performance space was developed from the sixth to the fourth century BCE and culminated in a series of exemplary theaters that played a significant role in Grecian public life. These outdoor theaters were built into the side of hills in such a manner that they took advantage of site topography, the prevailing winds, and sun orientation. The performer, standing at the focal point of the semicircular space, needed to be heard clearly by all members of the audience. Hz (Hertz) (n.d.) is a unit of frequency. The number of Hz (cycles per second; one Hz = one cycle per second) reflects the rate of any phenomenon (e.g., light, sound, radar) that has regular periodic variations.

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Figure 5.1  Greek theater at Epidaurus.

The Greek theater at Epidaurus, (see Figure 5.1) dating from the fourthCentury bce, could hold 14,000 people, all of whom could hear the speakers from the 55 rows of seats. Using specific site planning strategies, along with a studied precision of the seat heights and their reflective absorptive behaviors, as well as the design of the skene (structures at the back of a stage for changing masks, etc.), the Greeks created a theater with astonishing auditory clarity for different kinds of vocal performances. These requirements for auditory precision supported the Greek theater tradition as a place of learning and entertainment through the act of listening. The theater tradition, best known for the development of the celebrated Greek tragedy, was considered an important part of civic education, and brought the community together in a series of shared experiences, essential to this early democratic culture. Citizens sat together in an egalitarian mode, not distributed by economic class, to share in this community of learning and entertainment (Ober & Strauss, 1990). The Romans, enamored by Greek architecture and theater design, would borrow this form and alter it for their own needs. Vitruvius (Marcus Vitruvius Pollio), the great architectural writer of the first century CE, devoted as much attention in The Ten Books of Architecture to sound, music, and acoustics as he did to the topics of site design and finish materials (Vitruvius, 1960). This level of attention to acoustical design is unmatched in current architectural writing and theory. Vitruvius’s treatises, along with the Romans’ sophisticated development of acoustical principles (from sound propagation and optimized reflecting surfaces to tuned cavity resonators), demonstrate a keen and necessary interest in acoustics and the belief that sound and music are necessary components of an architectural education. Vitruvius’s writings on sound and architecture encompassed two modes: an ideal or “proportional” mode and a real or “actual” mode (Sheridan & Van Lengen, 2003). Sheridan and Van Lengen (2003) explained that “The ‘proportional mode’, in Pythagorean fashion, relates the spatiovisual experience of width, height, and depth to the tonal experience” of harmonics which references a “normative, mathematical truth in the form of simple numerical ratios” (p. 38). In contrast, the “actual mode” based on studied experience and experimentation, describes how certain physical conditions influence the aural conditions of a space. Neither the Greeks nor the Romans had a developed science of acoustics in the modern

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sense, where tone is tied to the rate of vibration and propagation tied to the elastic behavior of air. The Greeks did, however, experience space free of the effects of literacy. In pre‐literate societies, circular, triangular, and conical shapes were favored over grids and cubic forms. Building forms reflected this preference following dynamic lines of force versus visual/orthogonal lines of a post literate organized perspective (see, for example, Bourdier & Minh‐Ha, 1985). Hellenistic architecture, as it evolved in the centuries following the invention of the Greek phonetic alphabet, saw a massive shift in the “sensate equilibrium of Greek citizenry…a shift from the ear to the eye” (Sheridan & Van Lengen, 2003, p. 39). The Athenian Acropolis, designed during this transitional period, reveals this shift, from one reflecting Greek aural consciousness to one reflecting literate space. Its statuary and bas‐relief became more realistic than its predecessors, and the architectural complex underwent a formal transformation – a transformation driven by “proportional, hierarchical, and subtle perspectival organization of the buildings” (Sheridan & Van Lengen, 2003, p. 39). Acoustically, this transition in design was in opposition to the Acropolis’s traditional sacred architecture, which was imbedded in the sounds of life and verbal communication. Instead, the Acropolis was designed with an emphasis on visual experience. More specifically, it incorporated highly reflective flat surfaces, with expanses open to the sky such that the experience of the Acropolis stood in contrast to the surrounding ambient sounds of Athens. Its role as a visual experience superseded its role as a container of communicative life. This ascendency of the visual over the aural characteristics of architecture would remain important in many successive periods of architectural history.

Medieval Examples Although one might argue that visual imagery has dominated the field of architecture, there are particular historical periods that have valued a more sensorial approach. The great cathedrals of the medieval period witnessed an unusual synthesis of the visual and the sonic. Gregorian chants, for example, were enriched by the very long reverberation times established by the architecture of the cathedrals and abbeys. This music, coupled with the visual awe of the great Gothic cathedrals, worked in a synthetic fashion to create a deeply emotive experience. Ranging from Le Thoronet in southern France to Santa Croce in Florence, the abbeys and cathedrals of Europe constituted an array of sacred resonators for expressing the Christian message. These were spaces that operated in both visual and acoustical realms providing an environment for the resuscitation of the words of God. Lawlor (1978, pp. 12–13) is one of the many listeners (and commentators) who has been touched by the visual and acoustical environment of Le Thoronet: This enclosure has been constructed upon a precise, almost uncanny acoustical knowledge. Here each sound, even a pin dropped at the end of the nave some 40 meters away, generates a full range of harmonic overtones…the nave is so sound‐sensitive that one becomes aware that every body movement creates an impact on the volume of air in the chamber.

Renaissance As the Renaissance began to develop in Europe, new architectural vocabularies and theories of architecture emerged. Members of the Italian Architectural Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1427) and Andrea Palladio (1518–1580) developed designs for new spatial experiences that grew out of the discovery of linear perspectival painting. Both Alberti and Palladio devoted attention to sound and music in the Vitruvian “Ideal” mode, which emphasized “the underlying proportion‐based continuity of music and architecture” (Sheridan & Van Lengen, 2003, p. 40). Alberti viewed music and geometry as essentially one and the same. As he wrote, “music

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is geometry translated into sound. In music, the very same harmonies are audible which inform the geometry of the building” (Wittkover, 1998, p.19). Palladio held a similar view, although he theorized less in written form on this subject. Like Alberti, Palladio’s buildings were designed using the measurements of harmonic proportions in plan, section, and elevation. However, there is little evidence that Renaissance architects paired visual spatial design with aural considerations for listening. While Gothic architecture had created a harmonic synthesis of music and structure, Renaissance architecture often sponsored a sonic tension between the music and the building. One of Palladio’s well‐known churches, Il Redentore in Venice (1592), is a masterpiece of architectural procession and proportion, using light and carved form to unfold as one processes from the entrance to the nave. The development of these proportional systems was central to Palladian architecture but there is little evidence to support the idea that Palladio was aware of the acoustical aspects of the church, as delineated by Vitruvius’s “actual mode”. Searching to explore this aspect in more depth, architectural historian Deborah Howard has suggested that there may have been more discussion about acoustic qualities than originally thought (Howard & Moretti, 2009). Her study of the acoustics of Venetian churches suggests that architects were beginning to notate acoustical details that might positively influence the sound of musical spaces. The results of this study indicate that these discoveries had been primarily utilized in the designs of the Ospedaletti (choir halls located in the Venetian hospitals and charities). The choirs in Venice had become extremely important and subsequently needed spaces that reinforced optimal sonic qualities. The Renaissance period also saw the introduction of new kinds of instruments that led to new kinds of musical performances. Compared to simpler, vocal predecessors like the Gregorian chant, motet, and hymn, these newer musical compositions were more complex and required an architecture that could accommodate these shifts in the discipline of musical composition. As orchestral music began to grow in the eighteenth century, it would require the development of an architectural envelop to fully hear and receive its fullness and complexity. The best acoustics for this complex polyphony were to be found in the simple shoebox‐shaped interior, similar to the Venetian Ospedaletto. The basic shape of the concert hall, as a shoebox form, remained a fairly consistent typology up until the mid‐twentieth century.

The Influence of the Industrial and Technological Revolutions The Industrial Revolution generated a significant transformation of Western culture. The shift  from an agrarian to an urban landscape, along with the new economy of speed and ­mechanization, brought social, political, urban, and architectural changes. Beginning in eighteenth‐century England, this revolution would introduce new kinds of energy, new building materials, new types of workspaces, and new kinds of transportation systems that significantly altered both the visual and sonic experiences of the Western world. It is hard to imagine the sounds of a seventeenth‐century English village as compared to the sonic realities of that same town today. From both an aural and spatial perspective, architecture needed to accommodate the momentous changes that were occurring. The most important features that would influence the sensibility of this new age were the introduction of new materials and the increase in building sizes, both of which affected building interiors. Factories were designed to house hundreds of workers using various types of new time‐saving equipment. The sounds of these spaces were dramatically different from the rural communities from which many of the workers had come. The urban streetscape included the sounds of trains, trolleys, and early automobiles set within a city that had become denser, and therefore noisier. Processed steel and the invention of the elevator gave rise to the American skyscraper. Great interior halls, as exemplified by the Crystal Palace in London or the Chicago World’s Fair, announced the beginning of a new interior scale that would continue to grow with the culture.

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This “birth of noise,” described by Futurist artist Luigi Russolo, demanded a sensorial adjustment to the increase and changes in the sounds of everyday life. In his manifesto to the Italian Futurist composer, Francesco Balilla Pratella, Russolo rejoices in this new world and its potential for new music: My dear Pratella, I submit to your Futurist genius these new ideas, and I invite you to discuss them with me. I am not a musician, so I have no acoustic preferences, nor works to defend. I am a Futurist painter who projects onto a profoundly loved art his will to renew everything. This is why, bolder than the bolder professional musician, totally unpreoccupied with my apparent incompetence, knowing that audacity gives prerogative and all possibilities, I have conceived the renovation of music through the “Art of Noise.” (Russolo, 1916/1986, p. 12)

It is in the context of this changing soundscape that the discipline of acoustics began. Following the opening of Harvard University’s Fogg Lecture Hall in 1894, the university immediately discovered that the hall did not function well as a lecture space due to excessive reverberation, making lectures unintelligible for large parts of the audience. Richard Morris Hunt, a renowned architect of the day, designed the hall using a visually elegant semi‐circular plan with a domed ceiling and arcaded perimeter. Dismayed by the situation, Harvard’s president, Charles William Eliot, called upon the young assistant professor of physics, Wallace Sabine, to remedy the situation. With no training in acoustics, Sabine conducted a series of experiments to measure the changes in the room acoustics based on additions and subtractions of different absorptive materials. He was able to relate space, volume, and absorption into a scientific formula, known as Sabine’s Law, where T is the reverberation time, V is equal to the room volume measured in cubic feet, and S represents the total square footage of absorption as expressed by Sabines.

T

0.049 (V/A)

The “Sabine,” also named after him, is equal to one unit of sound absorbing power. Not only did he improve the listening conditions for Fogg Lecture Hall, but he is credited with the establishment of a new engineering discipline, acoustical design, which would grow and develop exponentially in the twentieth century. His methods would be required more ­frequently as the century progressed. As the Industrial Revolution grew into the twentieth century, it brought a new architectural vocabulary and style that would reflect this new “machine age”. The use of glass and steel, the bread and butter of the “International Style”2 of architecture, was promoted by the Bauhaus School3 in Germany, led by Walter Gropius, with Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, and many other Modern architects. This new architecture held the dream of creating prefabricated components that could be mass‐produced and built as a unifying system of construction for an emerging global culture. Its structural organizing principle was the “frame”. These rectilinear

The International Style is a style of architecture that primarily developed in the 1920–1930 period. The style is noted for its rectilinear structures, its dominant use of glass and steel, and its lack of ornamentation. The term was first used by Henry Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson in their 1932 essay, entitled, “The International Style: Architecture since 1922”. This essay was written for an accompanying exhibition on architecture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. 3 Bauhaus School, located in Dessau, Germany, was a defining influence in modern architecture, and in its progressive and creative development of architecture closely aligned with art, industrial design, and fashion. It was influenced by the preceding nineteenth‐century movements such as the Arts and Crafts movement, as well as the Vienna Succession. It was closed by the Nazis in 1933, and many of its leaders and faculty emigrated to America to continue their work. 2

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frames, built of steel, could support a variety of interior configurations depending on their various programs, and could be infilled with a material (typically flat), which in turn could be used to create modular bays enclosed by a variety of parallel surfaces. However, because this design method incorporated highly reflective materials (e.g., glass, metal, concrete), the spaces became prone to a range of acoustical problems, such as excessive reverberation, unwanted noise, as well as unusual resonance patterns that accentuated some frequencies and dampened others. The problem was compounded by one of the main tenets of the Modern Movement in architecture, namely the elimination of ornament and other surface treatments, a condition which resulted in spaces with no means to absorb sound energy, also known as “acoustic glare” (Thompson, 2002). From a sonic perspective, most Modern architecture devolved into a series of infinitely reflecting, internally mirrored spaces. In addition, as the historian Emily Thompson (2002) has noted, these new twentieth ‐century buildings would be dominated by emerging air conditioning systems that climatized the interior spaces, but also created their own white noise, effectively cutting people off from the exterior sonic environment. Ironically, glass facades that opened up impressive views to the landscapes beyond also shut out the sounds of those visible landscapes, separating vision and sound as isolated senses. This condition is particularly notable with domestic architecture. A home in Phoenix, Arizona, sealed by its non‐operable windows and interior air conditioning systems, sounds the same as a home in the mountains of Colorado, when in reality these locations sponsor different climatic conditions, wildlife patterns, and associated soundscapes that have largely become inaccessible to those living in their hermetically sealed environments. One might certainly make the case here that environmental awareness would be augmented if our habitable spaces were more closely connected to the local habitat, particularly through the attributes of sound and listening. The technological revolution that has grown out of the Industrial Revolution exploded in the second half of the twentieth century, with multiple avenues of development that have significantly influenced architecture and design. One of the most impressive transformations is associated with the acoustics of concert halls and listening spaces that have been designed using innovative technologies and software programs. These tools have not only affected all types of performance spaces, but they have also begun to shape new kinds of performative institutional and commercial spaces. The ARUP Group has been one of the industry leaders. A well‐known global engineering firm, they have developed “The Sound Lab”, which is an actual space for evaluating and predicting how sound will function in different kinds of ­architectural settings. The lab (as described by New York City principal, Raj Patel) is used to counsel clients on how best to achieve their desired listening experiences before the architectural design process begins. Using a “convolution reverb process”4 engineers can simulate how the same orchestral performance may be heard differently depending on the architectural space in which it is played. The purpose of this exercise is to allow engineers and architects to sample existing spaces with the aim of simulating the desired acoustic effect for other projects not yet built. For architects, this preliminary information is transformative, as it can help to guide the design process from the very beginning, rather than having to adapt designs to acoustical requirements after the basic spatial enclosure has already been created. Another emerging strategy for acoustic design performance lies in parametric modeling ­programs that in recent years have become very sophisticated. A notable example is the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany, designed by the architects Herzog and de Meuron, Convulsion reverb process: An impulse response rate of a real space can be obtained by taking the bursting of a balloon or a similar type of sound and measuring how long the sound takes to die out in the space. That reverberation time is then put through a process of deconvolution in order to get the impulse response of the space.

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with Ben Koren and the Japanese acoustician, Yasuhisa Toyoto. The concert hall was built over an existing nineteenth‐century warehouse building and began with a set of restricted dimensions. Consequently, the architects had limited flexibility in shaping the interior space. The narrow building base required a steep slope in order to place the required seats in the desired centrally organized plan. Working with parametric design algorithms, the designers created 10,000 unique gypsum fiber panel sections that together form the acoustical paneling of the entire hall, thus providing excellent and consistent listening experiences for the entire audience (Allen, 2018). Other acoustic software programs are being used to predict the level of interior sound ­infiltration from transportation systems such as trains and planes as well as that of exterior machinery. These predictions give architects the opportunity to design around existing conditions from the beginning of a project, thus eliminating the need to retrofit their buildings after completion. Designers can choose from a host of different kinds of windows and wall treatments that can effectively reduce unwanted sound noise and vibrations. Using these methods, architects can develop spatially interesting volumes that can merge with optimal acoustical conditions. Acentech, a Boston‐based acoustical engineering firm, began their “Utilization Technology” about 30 years ago and have developed a “Syntax” Lab to predict acoustical outcomes. This lab simulates a variety of architectural spaces, including the institutional, residential, and commercial. For example, it can simulate an interior institutional space in its design development phase, presenting different acoustical outcomes based on different material selections or changes to the spatial volume and its definition. Thus, the lab helps to educate clients on how best to make decisions with respect to the sonic requirements of their projects. The new influx of open office spaces, for instance, has required a specific set of design parameters in order to effectively delineate different sonic conditions for diverse work environments. Dubbed by Acentech as “Acoustical Neighborhoods,” these spaces are planned with different sonic identities in order to work effectively. Other new technologies, such as holosonic speakers, allow highly directed sound to be emitted in only one area of a room without disturbing other sections of the same room. Also known as audio spotlights, these speakers generate ultrasonic or high frequency sound waves, which have a shorter wavelength that will not spread out like normal sound waves and thus can be focused to a specific location. One can experience this technology in many museum installations where sound is part of the exhibit, or in public spaces such as the Sound Lounge at University of Virginia, designed to create new listening environments for students (Block, 2010). In addition, today’s building codes are very specific with respect to acoustic requirements for all types of construction, including sound transfer from inside to outside as well as within the building envelope. Architects must work within these parameters in the design of any new building or renovation. As a result, acoustic materials have become much more sophisticated over the past 25 years, allowing designers to pair sonic and aesthetic goals. For example, panelized wood ceilings and walls have been engineered with small apertures and absorptive backing materials that can significantly reduce sound reflections, while also providing the sensation of warmth created by the wood.

The Influence of Sound Art Before turning to more current concepts of architectural listening and designing, it is useful to frame this work with the prominent examples of artists who have created transformative ideas and concepts related to sound and listening for the past 70 years. These examples, often ­created by composers and conceptual artists, have served to influence the development of

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musical composition as well as the larger context of conceptual art. These examples call attention to the role of architecture in capturing and shaping sounds that invite participants to develop other ways of sensing architectural space and promoting communication. Russolo’s “art of noise” concept is a backdrop for some of the formative work of artist and composer, John Cage, who introduced his 4’3” composition in 1952, in Woodstock, New York, when his friend and composer David Tudor “played” this piece to a live audience. Tudor walked on stage, sat down at the piano, and closed the keyboard cover. He then put his watch on the piano cover, sat upright and attentive for 4 minutes and 33 seconds with the full attention of the audience. At the end of the period, he rose, bowed and left the stage. This piece demanded that the audience recalibrate their idea of the concert performance. Cage had led them to listen to the unique sounds all around them, and in so doing he made the sounds of the ambient environment ripe for compositional purposes. He also opened up the act of listening as a positive and deeply creative pursuit. As Cage (1990) has written, “Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating” (p. 3). In 1969, composer Alvin Lucier used a simple methodology to discover the resonant frequencies of an architectural space. He recorded the sounds of his own voice in a short monologue, and then played the recording back into the room while also recording it again. After several rounds of these recordings, the voice of the original recording disintegrated into a single tone, that of the resonant tone of the room itself. Lucier demonstrated that architecture is not sonically neutral, a lesson that our ancestors had learned centuries prior. This simple exercise is an effective way to perceive the sonic signature of an existing room or space. Cage and Lucier reopened avenues for listening and focused attention on the architectures that capture sound. The sonic identity of a space became a groundbreaking feature of the 1995 David Hykes Concert at the Kitchen in New York City (a performance space known for its experimental music and happenings). Hykes, the founder of the Harmonic Choir, used the transfer of sound to demonstrate the special sonic qualities of different interior spaces. The Harmonic Choir performed a repertoire of overtone singing in the Kitchen’s recording space. As they sang, their voices were transmitted live to the Cistercian abbey of Le Thoronet in France. This space, as mentioned earlier, is one of the most sonically reverberant medieval abbeys in Europe. Using an Integrated Services Digital Network line directly connected to the abbey, the recorded sounds of the choir reshaped by the acoustic characteristics of Le Thoronet were then played back into the space of the Kitchen. The audience heard a performance that had been acoustically shaped by Le Thoronet, not the auditorium of the Kitchen—a displacement of sound and space. The ARUP Sound Lab now performs something similar in their sound lab, as the technology to displace sound has become more advanced. David Hykes’ performance was a revolutionary idea at that time and it shaped the audience’s sensorial experience as well as their understanding of the importance of sonics in architectural space. Artists have also used sound to reveal the often forgotten special aural identities of architectural infrastructures. Bill Fontana, in his Harmonic Bridge project for the Tate Modern in London (2006), used sensitive accelerometer technology to record the sound vibrations of the bridge’s structure, due to the normal movements and fluctuations of the bridge. These sounds were then amplified and transmitted to the gallery in real time, in order to create a new sonic experience for the Tate Modern audience, bringing awareness to the interactive sounds of architectural infrastructures that exist all around us. The last example demonstrates the use of sound as a generator of space (see Figure 5.2). Bernhard Leitner, trained as an architect and urban designer in Germany, began to experiment with making space out of sound. Since the 1960’s, Leitner has deployed sound as an architectural element that builds a space (Lopez, 2011b). Leitner believes that modern architectural theory is devoid of any relation between sound, space, and the body, and so his work has

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Figure 5.2  Sound tube 1974.

addressed this theme by engaging the body in the sensorial experience of sound. In his installations, he focuses sound in specific regions of a space and those spaces are marked by minimal visual cues (see, for example, https://vimeo.com/253408023). Leitner demands that the visitor participate in, rather than passively receive sound, as would be the case in a concert hall, for example. This attention to the body, as a receptor of sound, harkens back to shamans of the Neolithic period that used sound to enter other realms of consciousness. The body could be a point of entry into how the discipline of architecture could intentionally use these concepts in the delineation of spaces as a way to feel and make sensorial places (see also, Lipari, this volume). Each of these noted examples point to the attention and interest that sound artists have demonstrated for the past 60 years. Their experiments, exhibitions, and performances have provided a sonic reawakening, related to architecture and communication, in an area that is still nascent with respect to the discipline and profession of architectural practice. In the next section I will examine some of the few typologies found in architectural design that have engaged with the sonic qualities of space, noting that, in general, these are not part of the ­normative architectural design process.

Listening and Architecture One area of architectural design that has actively engaged with sound as well as the other senses is exhibition design. In the past century, world fairs and expos, though temporary, have been fertile grounds for experimenting with innovative listening experiences. Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis’s 1958 Philips Pavilion for the Brussels World Fair experimented by ­creating

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a hyperbolic paraboloidal building shape constructed of tensile cables with thin concrete panels that appeared to look like a twisting tent structure. The interior space contained films, images, lights, and music, all designed as a complete sensorial experience. Their unique building project, known as “Electronic Poem,” was also designed to synthesize with the electronic musical compositions created in collaboration with both Xenakis as well as Edgard Varese; it turned the building into an instrument of its own, delivering an inclusive experience of sound and space (Lopez, 2011a). In 2000, the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor created the Swiss Pavilion’s “Sound Box.” Made of larch and Douglas fir wood members, the Sound Box was a kind of giant labyrinth of sound, light, touch, and smell. It downplayed the visual experience in favor of the other senses, especially sound, as the name implies. The presentation of Switzerland was transformed from the prosaic image of a cow standing in front of the snow‐capped Swiss Alps to an actual experience of the sounds, smells, and haptics of this culture. Visitors took their headphones off and put their cell phones away for this visit. A third example is that of the Blur Building (see Figure 5.3) at Lake Neuchatel, Switzerland, by architects, Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro, constructed for the 2002 Swiss Expo. This construction, located in the Lake itself and accessed by ramps, has been described by its creators as an “architecture of atmosphere,” (Blur Building, 2002). The structure included thousands of high‐powered water nozzles that produced a mass of fog and mist to create a unique atmosphere in which sound and vision were dramatically altered. As visitors entered the fog space they could only see a few feet around them, and their soundscape included the hum of the water nozzles that had created the fog. However, the voices of the visitors dominated the experience and became moments of discovery as people moved in and out of auditory range. Again, this was an all‐encompassing atmospheric environment in which listening to others dominated the spatial experience. Again, as noted in the Sound Box exhibition space, personal headsets and cell phones would have negated the experience of this installation and prevented a significant memory of the work. We can see from these few examples that exhibition architecture has provided opportunities for architects to explore concepts of sound and sensorial experience. Because this typology does not have the normative programmatic requirements associated with architectural design, it is more open to explore and experiment with these ideas. However, there are also some well‐known intentional examples of residential architecture that demonstrate how sound and ambience can become transformative properties of architectural spaces. At Monticello (Charlottesville, VA), for example, Thomas Jefferson created two “Venetian Porches (Beiswanger, 1998) on the south and east side of the main floor. They are both enclosed by floor to ceiling wooden louvers that block any visual connection to the

Figure 5.3  BLUR building by Diller Scofidio and Renfro.

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Figure 5.4  Falling Water (Kaufmann residence) by Frank Lloyd Wright.

outdoor areas. Although it is not known how Jefferson used these spaces, one can certainly ­imagine that they became spaces not only for effective ventilation but for listening as well. In Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic house, Falling Water (1935), located on the Bear Run Tributary in western Pennsylvania, there is a commanding view of the river as the house cantilevers over it (see Figure 5.4). The visual aspects of this house are well known, but one of its most spectacular design features is the hatchway stair located in the living room. The glass hatchway leads into an open stairway that descends to the stream and natural pool below. The hatchway is designed to be left open, if desired, which allows the sound of the running water to penetrate the living room and remind the listener of this delicate balance between house and landscape. In another example, the Wall‐Less House, Nagano, Japan, Shigeru Ban (n.d.) created a house in which the side and front exterior glass walls can be completely folded away to allow the house to be entirely integrated into its’ forest setting. The floor slab turns up at the rear wall of the house to receive the weight of the roof and in so doing has a curve that captures the sounds from the landscape and directs them back into the room. When the Vitra Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany sponsored The OPEN House Exhibition (2007) to promote new ideas in domestic architecture, Karen Van Lengen, Joel Sanders, and Ben Rubin, created the MIX House project as an experimental house that listens to and records the surrounding landscape (See Figure 5.5). The house was designed to record local sounds, from the front yard, back yard, and sky and to transmit these sounds to the interior MIX Counter where inhabitants would be able to “mix” or create original compositions of the sonics of their local habitats. Now housed at the Art Institute of Chicago, this design aims to inspire people to intentionally listen to their domestic environments as a source

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Figure 5.5  MIX House.

of local knowledge as well as to provide a venue to create new sound compositions together (Von Vegesack, & Eisenbrandt, 2006). As we turn to the public realm, there are diverse methods to alter the sounds and behavior patterns of people who frequent these spaces. The Samuel Paley Plaza (1967) in mid‐town Manhattan, (3 East 53rd St.) New York City is an excellent example of sonically designed space for the general public. As one of the earliest “pocket parks” in this area, it was designed by the architect Albert Preston Moore, with landscape architects Zion & Breen, to become an urban “room” accessed from 53rd street and designed around sonic themes. The back façade of the space is a continuous wall of running water that shuts out the noise of street traffic, while the two “green” side walls offer a habitat for birds, which give this space a unique sonic signature in this densely populated area of New York City. In urban areas that are not as dense and lively as New York, artists have begun to create installation pieces that promote interactive engagement with a public place using sound as a primary generator of activities. Artist and architect, Usman Haque (2019) has written: The domain of architecture has been transformed by developments in interaction research, wearable computing, mobile connectivity, people‐centered design, contextual awareness, RFID systems and ubiquitous computing. These technologies alter our understanding of space and change the way we relate to each other. We no longer think of architecture as static and immutable; instead we see it as dynamic, responsive and conversant.

In Usman Haque’s 2012 Marling Installation, in Eindhoven, Netherlands, he developed a program that used the real time voices of people to create lighted spaces in the public square. These fleeting light sculptures prompted human engagement as visitors experimented with the sounds of their own voices in collaboration with others. The light volumes of the space were constantly changing depending on the actions of the people and they provided an endless set of collective engagements within the space.

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Reimagining the Architectural Design Process There are certainly other examples showcasing how architects have made sound‐specific spaces for special projects; however, the discipline as a whole has not actively engaged in sound as a criterion for design. The profession has yet to embrace sound and listening as an integral part of its process, leaving the aural qualities of most spaces unaddressed. One of the challenges of acoustical or sonic design for the architect lies in the fact that architects, trained to visualize new spaces in their working process, are not trained to imagine acoustical space in a like manner. It is important to consider why this is true and how the profession might begin to address this condition more effectively. As a point of comparison, it is useful to consider the design of light as it relates to architecture. Designers and students can easily use digital light analysis programs to track how light and reflections will infiltrate and animate future spaces. Light has long been a design parameter in the discipline. In fact, even before computer software programs existed, architects used real models to simulate the path of the sun onto and into their schematic space models. Sound, on the other hand, is far more difficult to predict. The aural ambience of any interior space is a result of its precise spatial volume and configuration, its materiality, and its occupants. Until a space is fully designed and occupied, it is difficult to assess precisely what it will sound like. Even when it is completed, it can vary considerably depending on the event and user group in the space. Sound is fleeting, never the same. It defies exact predictions, except in precise listening situations such as the concert hall. As a result, architects have normally ignored this attribute in both architectural education as well as their professional practices. Sound is also difficult to portray in books or articles about architecture. Even on websites, where sound may be used, architects often utilize sound tracks with their presentations that do not reflect the actual sounds of the space. Adding to its disregard, architectural critics and writers have rarely discussed issues of sonic matching except when it relates to music and performance halls. Moreover, architects themselves rarely mention the soundscapes of their own projects on their websites or in lectures about their work. In general, it has not been an evaluative part of the discipline. This situation is even more acute in architectural schools where it is almost impossible to predict the sound environment of a young design project that, at best, is in a concept stage of development. In fact, some architecture schools do not require or even offer courses in acoustics or sound studies, leaving it completely out of the curriculum. Moreover, the discipline of acoustics is normally housed in schools of engineering, not architecture.

Reawakening Aural and Visual Design Bringing the design profession into this field of sound will require a necessary effort that begins with listening. This conscious act needs to be taught and nurtured carefully before it can shape the teaching and practice of architectural design. Architects and designers have the imagination to consciously shape sonic environments with purpose, but they need a reawakening to begin this process. One strategy begins with architectural education in which students learn to listen while they learn to look. Sketching what they see can be balanced by sketching what they hear. The latter sketch is important not so much for the resultant drawing but for the process that created it. This process requires a form of deep listening and concentration in the sonics of space that is new to students of architecture. When both the visual and aural documentation exist in tandem, the student can associate these attributes together, building a memory of both vision and sound that describes architectural space. The more architects listen attentively to spaces, the better they can understand the conditions that create those soundscapes.

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A second strategy is exposing architects to key sonic spaces. In 2014, in collaboration with the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, Jim Welty and Karen Van Lengen, with Worthy Martin, created a web‐based interactive site, called Soundscape Architecture (Soundscape Architecture, 2013/2018). The site exists as a platform to display the sounds of iconic buildings in architectural history. Each represented building includes an analysis of the components that have shaped those sounds – the spatial configuration, the volume, the materials, and the occupancy. Using this site, it is possible for visitors to begin to understand the diversity of soundscapes associated with different architectural conditions.

Conclusion It is evident that sound and listening have had important and diverse roles in the histories of world cultures and that the discipline of architecture has responded differently to these conditions. Architects today practice in a transformative time in which computational processes can help them evaluate a range of possibilities in design, from complex structural systems, to new formal relationships, to new environmentally appropriate materials and thermally sensitive conditions. Learning to evaluate and design with sound is also becoming much more accessible, with new software programs and evaluative tools. The promotion of a listening culture in architecture can reinvigorate our design processes and the resultant spaces and public realm at a pivotal time in our history. The very technologies that separate us in our public realm could be rethought to sponsor more inclusive spaces that demand our presence and that offer possibilities for new engagements at the local level. As Voegelin (2018, p. 47) has written: Sound as a concept invites us into the materiality of things, not to deny the visual but to augment how we might see; and it transgresses the boundaries between the object, the thing looked at, and the space and context of its appreciation, introducing a sense of simultaneity instead of pre‐ existence, and promoting the reading and experiencing of things as agitational, interventionist, multisensory and capacious.

In a 2013 visit to the Guggenheim Museum in New York City for the exhibition Gutai: Splendid Playground, I listened carefully to the ambient sounds of the space created by its architecture and animated by the visitors and the sonics of the exhibition. The Guggenheim, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1959, is defined by a central space enclosed by a continuous exhibition ramp to the fourth floor. Visitors continuously share in the volume of this space as they ascend and descend the exhibition. That day, there was a young child in a stroller in the lobby who, enchanted with the artifacts hanging above his head, kept screaming into the space above. His scream was not one of frustration or anger or want, but a joyful scream, one of delight and excitement. His voice filled the four‐story space, and his exuberance remains with me when I recall this exhibition and its artifacts. As I left the ramp on my way out of the show, I noted again one of the beginning explanatory panels, with a quote from one of the Gutai artists, Yoshihara Jiro, which read: Gutai places an utmost premium on the daring advance into the unknown world. Granted, our works have frequently been mistaken for Dadaist gestures. And we certainly acknowledge the achievement of Dada. But unlike Dada, Gutai Art is the product that has arisen from the pursuit of possibilities. Gutai aspires to present exhibitions filled with vibrant spirit, exhibitions in which an intense cry accompanies the discovery of the new life of matter (Gutai bijutsu sengen, 1956).

It is in the pursuit of possibilities that sound and listening offer a richness of new experiences intimately tied to the architectural spaces that house them. The discipline is ripe to take this on

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and open the landscape of the built environment to possibilities of shared experiences, ­connectivity, and new unexpected associations. This can be done with intention, all the while knowing that sound environments will be unpredictable, fleeting, and filled with new ideas and knowledge, if we can only listen to them.

References Acoustical Society of America. (2017, June 29). Acoustic scientist sounds off about the location of cave paintings. Retrieved from https://phys.org/news/2017‐06‐acoustic‐scientist‐cave.html Allen, D. (2018, February 10). Elbphilharmonie Hamburg. ArchiExpo‐E Magazine. Retrieved from http://emag.archiexpo.com/elbphilharmonie‐hamburg‐sculpting‐sound Ban, S. (n.d.). Wall‐ess house. Shigeru Ban Architects. Retrieved from http://www.shigerubanarchitects. com/works/1997_wall‐less‐house/index.html Beiswanger, W. (1998, Winter) Jefferson’s venetian porches restored. Monticello Newsletter, 9. Retrieved from https://www.monticello.org/site/research‐and‐collections/venetian‐porches Bijsterveld, K. (2008), Mechanical sound: Technology, culture, and public problems of noise in the twentieth century. London: MIT Press. Blesser, B., & Salter, L. (2007). Spaces speak. Are you listening? Boston: MIT Press. Block, A. (2010). Listen and learn: Joel Sanders and Karen Van Lengen should run for office. Retrieved from https://www.interiordesign.net/articles/6759‐listen‐and‐learn Bourdier, J‐P, & Minh‐ha, T. T. (1985). African spaces: Designs for living in upper Volta. Teaneck, NJ: Holmes & Meier Publishers. Bull, M. (2006). Auditory. In C. A. Jones (Ed.), Sensorium: Embodied experience, technology, and contemporary art (pp. 112–114). Cambridge, Mass., MIT. Cage, J. (1990). The future of music: Credo. In D. Lander & M. Lexier (Ed.), Sound by artists (p. 15). Toronto: Art Metropole and Walter Phillips Gallery. Cook, I. A., Pajot, S. K., & Leuchter, A. F. (2008). Ancient architectural acoustic resonance patterns and regional brain activity. Time and Mind, 1, 95–104. https://doi.org/10.2752/175169608783489099 Blur building: Swiss expo. (2002). Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Retrieved from https://dsrny.com/project/ blur‐building Gutai bijutsu sengen. (1956, Dec.). Geijutsu Shinchō 7(12). (R. Tomii, Trans.). Retrieved from http:// web.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/gutai/data/manifesto.html Haque, U. (2019) Design + research. Retrieved from http://www.haque.co.uk Hertz. (n.d.) Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/science/hertz Hobart, M. E., & Schiffman, Z. S. (1998). Information ages: Literacy, numeracy, and the computer revolution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Howard, D., & Moretti, L. (2009). Sound and space in renaissance Venice: Architecture, music, acoustic. New Haven: Yale University Press. Keller, H. (1933). Helen Keller in Scotland: A personal record written by herself. (J. K. Love, Ed.). Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/helenkellerinsco00hele/page/n9 Lawlor, R. (1978). Geometry at the service of prayer: Reflections on Cistercian Mystic architecture. Parabola, 3, 12–13. Lopez, O. (2011a, Aug. 25) AD Classics: Expo ’58 + Philips Pavilion. Archdaily. Retrieved from https:// www.archdaily.com/157658/ad‐classics‐expo‐58‐philips‐pavilion‐le‐corbusier‐and‐iannis‐xenakis Lopez, O. (2011b, Sept. 23) Bernhard Leitner: Sound spaces. Archdaily. Retrieved from https://www. archdaily.com/168979/bernhard‐leitner‐sound‐spaces Lubman, D. (2008). Convolution‐scattering model for staircase echoes at the temple of Kukulkan, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 123, 4161–4166. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.2934779 Ober, J., & Strauss B. (1990). Drama, political rhetoric and discourse of Athenian democracy. In J. Winkler & F. Zeitlin (Ed.), Nothing to do with Dionysus? (p. 237–270). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Russolo, L. (1916/1986). L’arte dei rumori (The art of noise). (Futurist Manifesto, 1913). (R. Filliou, Trans.). New York: Ubu Classics (Originally published in 1967 as a Great Bear Pamphlet by Something Else Press). Retrieved from http://www.artype.de/Sammlung/pdf/russolo_noise.pdf

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Sheridan, T., & Van Lengen, K. (2003). Hearing architecture: Exploring and designing the aural environment, JournalofArchitecturalEducation, 57, 37–44.https://doi.org/10.1162/104648803770558978 Soundscape architecture. (2013/2018). The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. University of Virginia. Retrieved from http://soundscape.iath.virginia.edu Thompson, E. (2002) The soundscape of modernity: Architectural acoustics and the culture of listening in America 1900–1933. Cambridge: MIT Press. UNESCO (United Nations Education Scientific and Cultural Organization) (n. d.). Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum: Description. Retrieved from http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/130/ Vitruvius. (1960). The ten books on architecture. (I. D. Rowland, Trans.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Voegelin, S. (2014). Sonic possible worlds. New York: Bloomsbury. Voegelin, S. (2018). The Political possibility of sound. New York: Bloomsbury. Von Vegesack, A., & Eisenbrandt, J. (Eds.). (2006). Open House: Architecture and Technology for Intelligent Living. Weil am Rhein, Germany: Vitra Design Museum/Art Center College of Design. Waller, S. J. (2014). Auditory illusions in the soundscapes of Rock Art and Stonehenge. In L. C. Eneix (Ed.), Archaeoacoustics: The archaeology of sound. Myakka, FL: OTSF. Wittkover, R. (1998). Architectural principles in the age of humanism (p.19) West Sussex: Academy Editions.

6

Audiology Annette Hurley and Meagan M. Walczak

All models of listening include hearing as an important step in how people process aural information. These models, however, typically focus on attributes (cognitive, affective, and behavioral) that occur following aural reception and that are believed to characterize listening (e.g., attention, comprehension, understanding, memory, interpretation) (Worthington, 2017); as such, few listening scholars consider any but the most basic attributes of hearing (see Imhof, this volume). Unfortunately, many people do not have perfect hearing. An estimated 38 million ­individuals 12 years or older in the American experience some level of bilateral hearing loss (Goman & Lin, 2016). In 2012, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that just over a third of adults worldwide over the age of 65 have hearing loss that compromises their daily communication. Notably, over 75% of adults with significant hearing loss refuse to wear hearing aids (Lin & Albert, 2014). Importantly, hearing loss has significant communicative and social effects including depression, loneliness, and mood swings, as well as with dementia and other types of cognitive decline (Li, et al., 2014; Lin & Albert, 2014; Wayne & Johnsrude, 2015). While hearing loss is often associated with a loss of sensitivity to quiet sounds, reduced understanding due to difficulties in segregating sounds (i.e., hearing conversations at a party) also can lead individuals to avoid social situations (Oxenham, 2018). As indicated in many other places in this volume, there is a distinct difference between hearing and listening. Hearing is passive, occurring continuously during every minute of the day. In contrast, listening is an active process, requiring us first to pay attention to, then ­process selected auditory stimuli, all while ignoring other auditory information. But, in order to listen, we must first be able to hear. It is this fundamental level – hearing – that audiologists emphasize in their research and clinical practice. Hearing and listening are interdependent activities in at least two ways. First, hearing provides the necessary foundation for listening. Second, sound, including speech, is transitory. Hearing impairments, when added to the fleeting nature of the sounds (signals) we receive, make it that much more difficult to interact with others. For instance, individuals with hearing impairments may complain of difficulty in hearing, of difficulty with understanding speech (especially in noisy conditions), of people mumbling or of misunderstanding what is being said; or they reply incorrectly (Montano, 2015). Few people think about their hearing, their passive auditory collector, until there is a dysfunction with the system and communication is impaired. The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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The focus of this chapter is on attributes and processes associated with hearing, hearing loss, and listening. The first section outlines basic hearing systems and anatomy. The second section explores hearing assessment, the effects of hearing loss for adults and children, and treatments for hearing loss. The final section addresses auditory processing problems and the effects of undiagnosed hearing loss.

Anatomy of Hearing While an in‐depth review of the complex auditory system is beyond the scope of this chapter, the following brief review highlights the elements central to audiological study. At the most basic level, the auditory system is divided into two systems, peripheral and central. The peripheral system includes the three divisions of the ear (outer, middle, inner), while the central auditory system consists of the pathways from the VIII cranial (or Vestibulocochlear) nerve to the auditory cortex. Dysfunctions in any part of the peripheral or central system may impair hearing.

The Peripheral System: Outer, Middle, and Inner Ear The outer ear is composed of the external appendage of the ear known as the pinna, or the auricle, and the ear canal, or external auditory meatus. The outer ear is responsible for collecting and funneling sound to the middle ear and is designed with grooves and indentations to allow sound localization in the vertical plane. At the end of the outer ear, there is an anatomical structure known as the tympanic membrane or eardrum that separates it from the middle ear. On the inside wall of this structure lies the malleus, incus, and stapes, the three bones in the middle ear that form the ossicular chain. These small bones articulate with each other in such a way to increase the mechanical pressure that is transduced into the inner ear. The inner ear contains two structures: the cochlea and the semicircular canals. The cochlea is an auditory structure, and the semicircular canals are a vestibular structure, responsible for balance. The cochlea is a snail shaped structure divided into three tunnels coiled together. The floor of the central tunnel (the basilar membrane) contains thousands of tiny hair cells, or receptor cells. On the top of the cells are hair‐like projections called stereocilia that move in response to the fluid traveling through the cochlea.

The Central Auditory System The auditory pathway from the cochlea to the brain, or auditory cortex, is complex. There are six separate brainstem nuclei where auditory stimuli undergo further analysis or processing of such parameters as timing, frequency, and intensity, before arriving at the auditory cortex. No other sensory system of the human body has six separate nuclei where additional analysis occurs. Briefly, specialized neuronal cells in these auditory nuclei respond differently, or are efficiently coded to fire to specific auditory parameters such as frequency, intensity, and sound onset. The redundancy of the neuronal representation in the central auditory nervous system (CANS) demonstrates the importance for auditory information to reach the brain. For detailed information about all of the brainstem structures in the CANS, see Pickles (2015).

The Process of Hearing Sound is our perceptual representation of patterns of vibrations received by the outer ear and operated on by a series of transducers within the middle and inner ear. Typically, most sounds are airborne; the air conduction mechanism is more sensitive than the bone conduction

Audiology 91 ­ echanism. The ear responds to frequencies, or the number of times a sound wave vibrates in m a second (measured by hertz: Hz), and to intensity, the pressure of the sound waves (measured by decibels: dB). Normal conversational speech, for example, is in the range of 400 to 4000 Hz and 60 dB (Handel, 1989). Sound waves are first channeled through the external canal and create vibrations on the eardrum. Both the outer and middle ear are air‐filled. When sound is transmitted down the ear canal, the tympanic membrane will vibrate, thus causing the ossicular chain to vibrate. The footplate of the stapes will push into the oval window, or the entrance into the inner ear, which is fluid‐ filled. As the stapes pushes into the oval window, a displacement of inner ear fluid occurs. As stereocilia of the hair cells bend, ion channels are opened, and the sound energy is transferred into electrical energy at the base of the hair cell. This electrical energy travels to the VIII cranial nerve that is attached to the base of the tiny hair cells. Nerve impulses then travel from the VIII cranial nerve to the auditory cortex where conscious hearing takes place. This section provided a brief overview of the basics of the auditory system, in the following section hearing assessment, common types of hearing loss, and treatments are introduced.

The Study of Hearing While historians have discovered writings as early as 1550 BCE from ‘physicians’ describing hearing disorders (Mudry, 2006), it was not until the 1920s that the first electric audiometer was invented (Jerger, 2019). This invention led to numerous advances in hearing assessment (e.g., middle ear analyzers, electronic hearing aids). Auditory rehabilitation gained even greater importance in the 1940s when thousands of service members returned from World War II with hearing loss from noise exposure (Jerger, 2019). The government responded by establishing hearing rehabilitation programs at the nation’s military hospitals where hearing aid fitting and aural rehabilitation procedures were standardized and implemented across the country. Following the war, the field of audiology was born (Jerger, 2019). Today, there are approximately 16 000 licensed audiologists in America. They are “the primary health‐care professionals who evaluate, diagnose, treat, and manage hearing loss and balance disorders in adults and children” (American Academy of Audiology, n.d.). Many audiologists have further specialized their skills to focus directly on pediatric, educational, vestibular, or other hearing disorder specialties. Hearing is not only a physiological process. It is also a sensory and perceptual event. The term “psychoacoustics” is the scientific study of sound perception and audiology. It also involves the psychological and physiological responses to sound, including speech, music, and noise. To understand the physiology of hearing, one must also understand the physics of sound. There are three important parameters of sound. The first is the frequency; the psychological correlate to frequency is the pitch of the sound. The second attribute is the intensity, or the loudness. The third attribute is time, the duration of the signal. These are very important in auditory discrimination tasks and aid in speech discrimination abilities (for further information about characteristics of sound, see Haumann & Brattico, this volume).

Hearing Assessment Audiology research has established that the human range of hearing is between 20 and 20 000 Hz, although the sounds we hear most often range between 125 and 8000 Hz (Pickles, 2015). This coincides with the important frequency range for human speech intelligibility (250–6000 Hz). Vowels of speech sound are more low frequency, giving us the power of speech (or awareness that someone is talking). Consonants are higher in

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frequency and ­ provide us the clarity of speech (e.g., /fin/ vs. /sin/). Audiologists ­routinely test hearing or establish thresholds from 250 to 8000 Hz. When testing a person’s hearing, audiologists report hearing in thresholds at each specific frequency, the lowest intensity level that a person can detect. Thresholds are recorded in decibels or dB. People with normal hearing have thresholds better than 20 or 25 dB. During a routine audiological assessment, the audiologist will also test a person’s ability to hear and repeat words or phrases. Audiologists also employ speech stimuli to determine how well a person can understand in quiet environments, or in background noise. Information from speech audiometry is important for counseling, and individuals normally seek a hearing evaluation when communication or understanding speech has become a problem.

Hearing Loss If some form of hearing loss is determined, the audiologist will determine the anatomical site of the disorder. This is done by testing pure tone signals through an air conduction pathway and bone conduction testing, stimulating the inner ear and central auditory pathway bypassing the outer and middle ear. The anatomical location of the breakdown in signal transmission determines the type of hearing loss.

Common Types of Hearing Loss

There are three common types of hearing loss: conductive, sensorineural, and mixed (Schlauch & Nelson, 2019). Common conductive hearing losses include impacted cerumen in the outer ear, fluid in the middle ear, or any abnormality that impedes signal dysfunction in the outer or middle ear. A sensorineural hearing loss occurs when there is a dysfunction in the inner ear. Common reasons for a sensorineural hearing loss include noise exposure, infections, or many genetic abnormalities that affect the tiny hair cells in the cochlea. Hearing loss also accompanies the normal aging process, although the degree of hearing loss and the age of onset cannot be determined. A mixed hearing loss denotes dysfunction of both the inner ear and the outer or middle ear. Treatment varies with the type and may include surgical intervention, medical management, and hearing aids. Hearing loss is reported in terms of the severity or degree, from mild hearing loss to profound. The audiologist will also describe the configuration or the shape of thresholds across the audiogram (flat, sloping, rising, etc.) to describe how specific frequencies are affected (Schlauch & Nelson, 2019). It is also important to note, that while two people may have the same hearing loss, they may experience different communication difficulties. For example, a young professional with a mild high frequency hearing loss may seek help for this hearing impairment, while an older, retired individual who lives alone may not notice any difficulty and may not seek help. Further, even a mild hearing loss may have severe consequences on communication. Any hearing loss in children, for instance, will negatively impact education and psychosocial development (Northern & Downs, 2014).

Hearing Loss in Adults

Hearing is the third most prevalent chronic health condition of older adults. As noted earlier, it affects approximately 37 million adults in America, with almost one in three adults over the age of 65 experiencing some level of hearing loss (Goman & Lin, 2016; World Health Organization, 2012). There are a number of contributing factors to hearing loss in adults, including age, noise exposure, genetics, or other health diseases (such as heart disease and diabetes). Other factors, such as an accident, a sudden virus, and some medications also may cause hearing loss. Adults with presbycusis (the term used to describe hearing loss associated with age)

Audiology 93 most often experience a gradual decline in their hearing that affects both ears equally. An estimated 250 million adults suffer from presbycusis, a disease marked by an initial loss of ability to hear the content of speech (i.e., words and phrases) followed by a loss of ability to hear paralinguistic cues (e.g., tone of voice, sarcasm) necessary for understanding conversations and the relational implications of speech (Villaume, Brown, & Darling, 1994; Villaume & Reid, 1990). Consequently, listeners with moderate, severe, and profound impairment are unable to fully engage with others or require interlocutors to repeat key information. Sufferers of presbycusis are required to expend inordinate energy to listening, increasing the cognitive demand during routine listening tasks. This process often leads to frustration and can result in social isolation, loneliness, and depression (Li et al., 2014). Typically, a high frequency sensorineural loss is attributed to presbycusis, or age‐related changes to components of the auditory system that affect the reception and transformation of sound waves, particularly within the cochlea. As explained, the cochlea (part of the inner ear) is composed of thousands of hair cells which die off, first high‐ then low‐frequency ones. Death of hair cells can lead to the loss of spiral ganglion neurons (SGNs), which are responsible for transmitting auditory information to the brain. SGNs can also deteriorate independently, suggesting multiple pathways to the gradual decline indicative of presbycusis. Ultimately, as individuals age so do parts of their auditory processing systems. Natural aging of our ears, neural pathways, and other components necessary for speech comprehension and understanding (e.g., memory, attention, speed of information processing) leads to decreased abilities to interact with others. In addition, there are several genetic and environmental factors that contribute to the age of onset for and the progression of presbycusis, including exposure to loud sounds. Indeed, the causes and effects of noise induced hearing loss (NIHL) in both young and old adults have received significant attention in recent years. Approximately 40 million adults have characteristics of NIHL (NIDCD, 2019). NIHL has become widespread to not only occupational noise, but also to noise exposure from recreational noise such as loud music and leisure activities (e.g., jet skis, all‐terrain vehicles). While short periods of noise exposure may not cause immediate hearing loss, damage from chronic noise exposure is cumulative with no known cure. The prevention of such hearing loss begins with education about the dangers of noise exposure and the importance of hearing protection when around loud noises. Besides damaged hearing, there are non‐auditory adverse health effects of noise exposure such as sleep disturbances, cardiovascular disease, stress, and cognitive effects (Fligor, Chasin, & Neitzel, 2015). As noted in the introduction of this chapter, hearing loss has significant communicative and social effects, including depression, loneliness, mood swings, cognitive decline, and reduced social engagement (Li, et al., 2014; Lin & Albert, 2014; Oxenham, 2018; Wayne & Johnsrude, 2015).

Hearing Loss in Children

Although hearing loss is most often associated with aging, hearing loss is actually the most common birth defect. Between 1 and 3 out of every 1000 infants will be diagnosed with hearing loss at birth (CDC, 2010). Today, advances in technology have allowed advanced screening and diagnosing of hearing loss shortly after birth. The incidence of hearing loss increases from 1–3 per 1000 newborns to approximately 14% of school‐age children (Davis & Davis, 2017). This increase is due to acquired causes (meningitis), delayed onset of hearing loss from syndromes, or delayed or hearing loss that was progressive or missed at birth. Additional surveillance of hearing as a child ages allows for detection and management of these types of hearing loss. Many states require hearing screenings for infants and school‐age children. If a child has a risk factor for hearing loss (e.g., greater than five days in a NICU, a family history of hearing loss, maternal infections during pregnancy or birth), a diagnostic hearing assessment should be completed before the child is two years of age.

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Hearing loss can affect a child’s ability to normally acquire spoken language (see Altvater‐ Mackensen, Chapter 8 in this volume). This creates problems for the child not only in terms of communication, but also complications in mental maturity, perception, speech, cognition and general intelligence, academic achievement, and interpersonal skills (Byrne, Themann, Meinke, Morata, & Stephenson, 2012). Awareness of a child’s hearing abilities gives professionals adequate time to manage a young child’s hearing loss with successful intervention. The goal of Early Hearing Detection and Intervention (EHDI) is to have hearing screening completed by one month, a hearing diagnosis by three months, and, if needed, intervention to begin by six months. Continued surveillance for possible hearing difficulties is recommended for all children in grades kindergarten through 3rd grade and in the 7th and 11th grades, or upon transfer into a new school. Periodic hearing screenings allow for detection and management of hearing loss that was acquired after the initial newborn hearing screening as a late‐onset or missed at birth. Being aware of a child’s hearing abilities soon after they are born (e.g., through neonatal hearing screening) gives hearing health professionals time to manage a young child’s hearing loss with effective intervention. The earlier the child with a hearing impairment begins services, the more likely the child’s speech, language, and social skills will reach their full potential. Children and adults have different auditory or listening needs. Children are more susceptible to the communication consequences of hearing loss because they are in the process of learning language (Cole & Flexer, 2015). Even a mild hearing loss can have significant consequences for children because of their limited language experience, immature auditory system, and immature linguistic analyzing framework (Cole & Flexer, 2015). As a result, they need optimal input because they do not have the life experiences to assist in “filling in” the gaps or “figuring out” what is missing. Children need a quieter environment, or a better signal‐to‐noise ratio, than adults for optimal hearing and listening. Children also learn by listening to others. In fact, 90% of language is from incidental learning (Cole & Flexer, 2015). A child’s central auditory pathway (auditory nerve to brain) continues to mature until approximately 10–12 years of age. In addition to their ability to learn language, hearing also is essential to learning in the classroom (Northern & Downs, 2014). Children with auditory deficits do not get access to speech and other sounds that arise from their teachers, classmates, and the classroom/school environment. Undiagnosed hearing deficits can negatively affect speech, language, and literacy development as well as social‐emotional development. A child may have poorer scholastic performance, which may not only affect the child’s academic performance, but also will affect self‐esteem (English, 2017).

Treatment for Hearing Loss Professional assessment and advice is needed to help determine treatment options for hearing loss. Options range from medical treatments or surgery to listening devices, such as hearing aids or other technologies. Treatment depends of the type of the hearing dysfunction and severity of hearing loss. For sensorineural hearing loss, there is no cure. No medicine or surgery can repair the tiny hair cells in the cochlear or repair the other delicate structures. Amplification devices do, however, exist to aid, or treat, hearing loss. A hearing aid is a small electronic device that amplifies sound, and most consist of four parts: a microphone, which receives sound and converts it to an electrical signal; an amplifier that increases the intensity of the signal; a speaker, which sends the sound to the ear; and a power supply, or battery. In some cases, hearing problems go beyond the peripheral auditory system to auditory processing problems. The following section briefly describes auditory processing problems,

Audiology 95 auditory training, as well as other auditory difficulties that may create difficulty in hearing and listening. It concludes with a discussion of the outcomes of undiagnosed hearing loss.

Auditory Processing Problems Audiologists are professionals trained to diagnose and treat problems or disruptions with the peripheral auditory system. An adult or child may not, however, have a hearing loss but still have complaints with understanding or hearing. When this occurs, additional diagnostic information about their auditory processing ability should be completed. An early scholar in auditory processing, Dr. Jack Katz, described auditory processing ability as “what we do with what we hear” (Katz, Stecker, & Henderson, 1992, p. 3). Broadly defined, auditory processing is how the brain uses auditory information. In many respects this is where listening, as defined in disciplines such as Psychology and Interpersonal Communication, comes into play (see Table I.1 in Worthington & Bodie, in the Introduction to this volume). Problems with auditory processing contribute to difficulties with perceptual processing of auditory information, which is thought to contribute to delays in skills for which successful listening serves a fundamental role. An auditory processing disorder affects a variety of populations and has several suspected causes including neuromaturational delay, neuroanatomical anomalies, and neurologic insult of the CANS (Musiek & Chermak, 2014). While audiologists diagnose and treat auditory processing disorder, working in collaboration with a multidisciplinary team is optimal for an accurate diagnosis and treatment plan. An audiologist employs a test battery to assure the signal is reaching the brain because a single test cannot assess every auditory processing skill. This battery includes tests that determine how a person hears when the signal is degraded (hearing in background noise, or when the signal is filtered, or compressed), as well as dichotic tests to determine how well the two ears are working together (i.e., can a person “ignore one ear” and listen to the stimuli in the other ear, how well can someone integrate information from both ears) (Musiek & Chermak, 2014). Non‐speech tests are often included in the test battery to determine if a person can discriminate small frequency, intensity, and timing differences. These may help determine if they can hear very small difference between, for instance, /da/ and /ba/ or /shoe/ and /chew/. The audiologist may also employ electrophysiologic tests such as an auditory brainstem response to a click or tone stimulus or other complex sounds such as speech. Recent work with the complex Auditory Brainstem Response (ABR) has shown that about 30% of children with a language‐based learning disorder may have a normal electrophysiological response to a non‐ speech sound, but an abnormal response to a speech signal. This difference in the person’s neural encoding of non‐speech and speech sound may negatively affect speech processing. Central to the audiologist’s testing is determining what difficulties the listener is having and if there are any additional academic concerns such as spelling or reading. It is not unusual for a young child to be diagnosed with attention problems, when in actuality they are having problems hearing the auditory signal clearly (Musiek & Chermak, 2014). Other types of difficulties include individuals who can hear the auditory signal correctly, but then have difficulty understanding the meaning of the signal, and children who may have an auditory receptive language disorder and need additional evaluations with other professionals, such as a speech‐ language pathologist. Once diagnosed with an auditory processing disorder, the audiologist will develop a treatment plan most appropriate to diagnosis. A comprehensive plan includes three main points: environmental modifications, compensatory strategies, and direct remediation. Environmental modifications include things such as preferential seating, improved lighting so that the listener can see the speaker’s face, and the use of a dynamic microphone to increase

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the signal‐to‐noise ratio at the listener’s ear. Compensatory strategies may also help, such as asking someone to repeat themselves and/or asking for clarification, repeating directions to ensure one understands, and educational accommodations or recommendations such as a note‐taker in a classroom or written instructions. Finally, the plan should contain recommendations for direct remediation, or auditory training, to target and improve areas of poor auditory processing or deficit auditory processing skills as discussed in the following section. Occasionally, an adult may report significant hearing difficulties, but all testing is within normal limits. For example, King‐Kopetzky Syndrome is an auditory stress disorder in which a patient has normal hearing, but reports difficulty listening in the presence of background noise (Hinchcliffe, 1992; Saunders & Haggard, 1989). Zhao and Stephens (2007) proposed the “impairment” may not be auditory, but psychological or psychologically “amplified.” King‐ Kopetzky Syndrome is a psychological diagnosis and a referral to a mental health professional may be warranted.

Auditory Training Auditory training, or auditory habilitation and rehabilitation, focuses on the development or improvement in the ability of the person’s listening skills. Musiek, Chermak, and Weihing (2014) described auditory training as “a set of (acoustic) conditions and or tasks that are designed to activate auditory and related systems in such a manner that their neural base and associated auditory behavior is altered in a positive way” (p. 158). Auditory training employs repetitive (listening) activities focused on maximizing the processing of acoustic signals. One such program is LACE® (Listening and Communication Enhancement). Developed by audiologists and software specialists, this online program was designed to help listeners cultivate skills and strategies to deal with situations like noisy rooms and multiple speakers when hearing is inadequate (LACE, n.d.). Training modules cover topics such as speech‐in‐noise, rapid speech, competing speaker, and word memory. LACE® has been utilized in several audiological studies with results showing improved on‐task listening demands (Chisolm et  al., 2013; Song, Skoe, Banai, & Kraus, 2012). Generalizations of learning during training, however, remained small. Levitt, Oden, Simon, Noack, and Lotze (2011) explored a common problem experienced by individuals using auditory training programs – lack of engagement. As noted above, these programs employ repetitive activities and require significant commitment from those utilizing the programs. The repetitiveness and time requirement can lead patients to drop out of the programs. Levitt et  al. found that by increasing the perceived entertainment value of the training, patients had higher engagement and were more likely to continue the training. Auditory training programs are recommended for children with hearing impairments, children with phonological processing deficits, some children with sound symbol deficits who have difficulty learning to read, and for adults with mild cognitive decline. They also are beneficial for persons who have received new technology, helping teach them how to use their residual hearing to maximize speech recognition. Today, advances in technology allow listeners to locate and utilize auditory training programs via the Internet or as mobile applications. Olson (2015) offered a review of LACE® and other Internet, software, and mobile application options for those with hearing loss.

Other Forms of Hearing Loss In addition to specific auditory processing problems, listeners may also experience other forms of commonly diagnosed hearing problems. In the sections that follow, we outline a few of the more well‐known and documented.

Audiology 97

Tinnitus Tinnitus is defined as the perception of sound that is in one’s ears or head that is not externally produced (Tyler, Noble, Coelho, Roncancio, & Jun, 2015). Often individuals will describe sounds such as ringing, buzzing, hissing, or pulsing. Tinnitus is a symptom of an underlying condition, such as noise exposure, a vascular condition, or a side effect from a medication, or something as simple as earwax. Tinnitus may also be one of the first signs of hearing loss. Therefore, an audiologist will usually be one of the professionals involved in tinnitus management with responsibilities to evaluate an individual’s hearing ability and assess the loudness, pitch, and maskability of the tinnitus. In addition, the audiologist will measure the consequences that tinnitus may have on the individual’s life. Although there is not a cure for tinnitus, there are several treatment options. These treatments may include hearing aids, sound generators, or a form of counseling or habituation therapy, such as Tinnitus Retraining Therapy (Jasterboff & Jasterboff, 2000). Although these therapy options may not cure tinnitus, they may reduce the patient’s reaction and distress associated with tinnitus.

Hyperacusis Individuals with tinnitus may also, in many cases, have hyperacusis. Hyperacusis is an auditory disorder in which ordinary sounds become loud and intolerable or sometimes painful (Tyler, et al., 2015). In addition to routine auditory measures, the audiologist will also measure the patient’s response to loudness and to the perceived growth in loudness. The audiologist may also measure the individual’s subjective “loudness and annoyance” of everyday sounds such as a barking dog or a car door closing and the handicap that negative consequences of hyperacusis may cause, such as avoidance, anxiousness, depression, and concentration (Tyler et al., 2015). An underlying medical condition such as head trauma or other infection may be associated with the cause of hyperacusis. Like tinnitus, there is not a cure for hyperacusis, but treatments such as sound therapy or tinnitus retraining therapy or counseling have been shown to improve a person’s reaction, such as annoyance or intolerability of sound (Tyler, et al., 2015).

Undiagnosed Hearing Loss Unfortunately, many people will not seek treatment for hearing loss, and for a variety of personal reasons. Sometimes, hearing loss occurs gradually. When this occurs, individuals may not be aware of hearing problems until it negatively affects communication (Montano, 2015). Symptoms of hearing loss vary greatly and may include: ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●●

Difficulty hearing in background noise. Asking for someone to repeat. Misunderstanding what was said. Turning up the television louder. Difficulty hearing some voices. Ringing in the ears. Avoiding social situations (Montano, 2015).

Depression can result from being isolated from others due to hearing loss, or from a general state of aging and noticing that things have changed. Communication is tiring and exhausting for the person with hearing impairment, and it may be easier to avoid conversations (Montano, 2015). A person with hearing loss may feel embarrassed because they do

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not understand, and they may be thought to be confused, unresponsive, or uncooperative because of hearing loss (Lin et al, 2014). Uhlmann, Larson, Rees, Koepsell, and Duckert (1989) first reported that hearing loss in older adults was associated with an increased likelihood of having dementia. The results of their study suggested that age‐related hearing loss could be a risk factor for dementia. Despite their intriguing results, little follow‐up research was conducted to explore this association – despite the increased likelihood of hearing impairment in older adults (Lin & Albert, 2014). More recently, however, investigators have begun to address this gap in the literature. For example, Yuan, Sun, Sang, Pham, and Kong’s (2018) meta‐analysis reported that elderly people with a peripheral hearing loss of 40 dB or greater had a higher risk of cognitive impairment. In their 25‐year longitudinal study, Amieva and colleagues (2015) found that study participants who self‐reported hearing loss experienced accelerated cognitive decline over the course of the study, while those who used hearing aids did not experience the same decline. Other researchers have reported similar results (e.g., Alattar et  al., 2019; Li et al., 2014; Ray, Popli, & Fell, 2018). While additional research is needed, these studies suggest that hearing loss is a risk factor for dementia and related cognitive decline in older adults. While there are many limitations in studies relating hearing loss and cognitive decline including comorbidities such as ototoxic drug use, lifestyle, and socioeconomic status, as these factors also influence age‐related hearing loss, what is clear is that hearing aids are an effective way to improve communication and decreased social isolation. Several theories have been advanced to support the hearing function and cognitive relationship. First, the over‐arching health conditions such as inflammatory, vascular, hormonal, nutritional, and metabolic pathways affect both brain or cognitive and auditory health (Panza, Solfrizzi, & Logroscino, 2015). In addition, age‐related hearing loss, or presbycusis, results in missing information from the signal. Therefore, the hearing‐impaired individual must allocate greater cognitive resources to understand the auditory signal, thus reducing resources for memory (Peelle, Troiana, Grossman, & Wingfield, 2011). Therefore, poorly encoded speech may cause changes in the way that the brain processes auditory information. Uchida and colleagues (2019) reported this reallocation of resources as a Cognitive Load Hypothesis in linking age‐related hearing loss and cognitive decline. Uchida et al. (2019) hypothesized a Common Cause Theory that contends the age‐factor to both sensory and cognitive decline based upon common factors as neural degeneration occur with age both in the peripheral and CANS. Finally, these investigators posited a Cascade Theory that attributes cognitive decline to the loss of auditory input to the brain. While additional studies are needed to affirm the link between hearing loss and dementia, investigators agree that hearing is important to brain health. It is important to treat hearing loss as early as possible, ideally before it starts to affect one’s emotional, psychological, and social well‐being. Changing negative perceptions about hearing loss may promote hearing health and individuals’ willingness to accept technologies to improve hearing and thus improve brain function. Normal hearing is optimal to have the full spectrum for the brain to hear and listen.

Conclusion In order for the brain to hear or listen, the auditory signal should be optimal. As this chapter reveals, hearing loss is a common, often untreated condition that has a number of potentially negative effects on our communication and social lives. Audiologists are medically trained professionals specializing in the treatment and diagnosis of hearing loss, who provide professional, personalized treatment to improve a person’s quality of life. With the help of an audiologist, adults and children can be correctly diagnosed and prescribed appropriate therapeutic regimens. Perhaps most importantly for those with hearing

Audiology 99 loss are ways to mitigate the negative impacts of hearing loss on communication and personal relationships. While successful everyday communication is often taken for granted for a person with normal hearing ability, a person with a hearing loss is often limited by the amount of residual hearing, the hearing device they are wearing, and their communication partner. Purposeful strategies by both the person with hearing or listening difficulties and their communication partner may aid successful communication. While there are numerous recommendations out there, we find the following communication strategies to be a useful summary, both for the person with a hearing impairment and for their communication partner (Tye‐Murray, 2020). The hard of hearing listener should: ●● ●● ●● ●● ●●

Advocate for yourself. Tell the person that is speaking that you have hearing difficulty. Look directly at the person who is speaking. Find a quiet environment; ask for the quietest table at a restaurant. Seat with your back to a wall so that you can face the speaker. Eliminate background noise, if possible. The communication partner should:

●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●●

Get the listener’s attention before speaking to them. Speak slowly, but avoid exaggerated mouth movements. Pause between statements. Rephrase if necessary. Do not eat or chew when speaking. Manage the lighting so that the listener can see your face. If possible, cue the individual when you change topics. If possible, use visual cues, or use when necessary/writing down a difficult word or phrase for clarification, if needed.

Although many of the tips may seem like common sense, it is important to bring them to the attention of the listener and their communication partner. Effective consideration and support by both parties will aid in effective communication. As audiologists, the betterment of not only individual well‐being but also relational health are two of the more important facets of our profession.

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Chisolm, T. H., Saunders, G. H., Frederick, M. T., McArdle, R. A., Smith, S. L., & Wilson, R. H. (2013). Learning to listen again: The role of compliance in auditory training for adults with hearing loss. American Journal of Audiology, 22, 339–342. https://doi.org/10.1044/1059‐0889(2013/1 2‐0081) Cole, B. E., & Flexer, C. (2015). Children with hearing loss: Developing listening and talking, birth to six (3rd ed.) San Diego, CA: Plural Publishing. Davis, A., & Davis, A. A. S. (2017). Descriptive epidemiology of childhood hearing impairment. In A.M. Tharpe & R. Seewald (Eds.). Comprehensive handbook of pediatric audiology (2nd ed., pp. 89–132) San Diego, CA: Plural Publishing. English, K. (2017). Adolescents with hearing loss. In A. M. Tharpe & R. Seewald (Eds.), Comprehensive handbook of pediatric audiology (2nd ed.). San Diego, CA: Plural Publishing. Fligor, B., Chasin, M., & Neitzel, R. (2015). Noise exposure. In J. Katz, M. Chasin, K. English, L. J. Hood, & K. L. Tillery (Eds.), Handbook of clinical audiology (7th ed., pp. 595–616). Philadelphia, PA: Wolters Kluwer. Goman, A. M., & Lin, F.R. (2016). Prevalence of hearing loss by severity in the United States. American Journal of Public Health, 106, 1820–1822. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2016.303299 Handel, S. (1989). Listening: An introduction to the perceptions of auditory events. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Hinchcliffe, R. (1992). King‐Kopetzky syndrome: An auditory stress disorder? Journal of Audiological Medicine, 1, 89–98. Jasterboff, P. J., & Jasterboff, M. M. (2000). Tinnitus retraining therapy (TRT) as a method for treatment of tinnitus and hyperacusis patients. Journal of the American Academy of Audiology, 11, 162–177. Retrieved from https://www.audiology.org/sites/default/files/journal/JAAA_11_ 03_05.pdf Jerger, J. (2019, May). Ten highlights from the history of audiology. Hearing Review, 26, 10–12, 14. Retrieved from http://digitaledition.hearingreview.com/hearingr/diged/201905/index.html Katz, J., Stecker, N. A., & Henderson, D. (1992). Introduction to central auditory processing. In J. Katz, N. A. Stecker, & D. Henderson (Eds.), Central auditory processing: A trans‐disciplinary view (pp. 3–8). St. Louis, MO: Mosby Year Book. LACE – Listening and communication enhancement. (n.d.). Neurotone, Inc. Retrieved from https:// www.neurotone.com/lace‐interactive‐listening‐program Levitt, H., Oden, C., Simon, H. H., Noack, C., Lotze, A. (2011, August). Entertainment overcomes barriers of auditory training. The Hearing Journal, 64(8), 40, 42. doi: 10.1097/01. HJ.0000403510.80465.7b Li, C., Zhang, X., Hoffman, H. J., Cotch, M. F., Themann, C. L., & Wilson, M. R. (2014). Hearing impairment associated with depression in US adults, National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2005–2010. JAMA Otolaryngol Head & Neck Surgery, 140, 293–302. https://doi. org/10.1001/jamaoto.2014.42 Lin, F. R., & Albert, M. (2014). Hearing loss and dementia – Who is listening? Aging & Mental Health, 18, 671–673. https://doi.org/10.1080/13607863.2014.915924 Montano, J. J. (2015). Audiologic rehabilitation. In J. Katz, M. Chasin, K. English, L. J. Hood, & K. L. Tillery. Handbook of clinical audiology (7th ed., pp. 849–860). Philadelphia, PA: Wolters Kluwer. Mudry, A. (2006). Otology in medical papyri in ancient Egypt. Mediterranean Journal of Otology, 3, 133–142. Retrieved from https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Otology‐in‐Medical‐Papyri‐ in‐Ancient‐Egypt‐Mudry/40d9a3e2c7435508d4faf5c52a177af123475ec2 Musiek, F.E., & Chermak, G.D. (Eds.) (2014). Handbook of central auditory processing disorder: Vol. 1. Auditory neuroscience and diagnosis (2nd ed.). San Diego, CA: Plural Publishing. Musiek, F. E., Chermak, G. D., & Weihing, J. (2014). Auditory training. In G. D. Chermak & F. E., Musiek (Eds.), Handbook of central auditory processing disorder: Comprehensive Intervention (Vol. 2, 2nd ed., pp. 157–201). San Diego, CA: Plural Publishing. National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD). (2019). Noise induced hearing loss. Retrieved from https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/noise‐induced‐hearing‐loss Northern, J., & Downs, M. P. (2014). Hearing in children (6th ed.) San Diego, CA: Plural Publishing. Olson A. D. (2015). Options for auditory training for adults with hearing loss. Seminars in hearing, 36, 284–295. http://doi.org/10.1055/s‐0035‐1564461

Audiology 101 Oxenham, A. J. (2018). How we hear: The perception and neural coding of sound. Annual Review of Psychology, 69, 27–50. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev‐psych‐122216‐011635 Panza, F., Solfrizzi, V., & Logroscino, G. (2015). Age‐related hearing impairment–a risk factor and frailty marker for dementia and AD. Nature Reviews Neurology, 11, 166–175. https://doi. org/10.1038/nrneurol.2015.12 Peelle, J. E., Troiani, V., Grossman, M., & Wingfeld, A. (2011). Hearing loss in older adults affects neural systems supporting speech comprehension. Journal of Neuroscience, 31, 12638–12643. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2559‐11.2011 Pickles, J. O. (2015). Auditory pathways; anatomy and physiology. In G.G. Celesia & G. Hickok (Eds.), Handbook of clinical neurology: The human auditory system: Fundamental organization and clinical disorders (Vol. 129; pp. 3–25). New York: Elsevier. Ray, J., Popli, G., & Fell, G. (2018). Association of cognition and age‐related hearing impairment in the English longitudinal study of ageing. JAMA: Otolaryngoly Head Neck Surgery, 144, 876–882. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamaoto.2018.1656 Saunders, G. H., & Haggard, M. P. (1989). The clinical assessment of obscure auditory dysfunction‐1. Auditory and psychological factors. Ear Hear, 10, 200–208. Schlauch, R. S., & Nelson, R. S. (2019). Puretone evaluation. In J. Katz, M. Chasin, K. English, L. J. Hood, & K. L. Tillery, Handbook of clinical audiology (7th ed., pp. 29–48) Philadelphia, PA: Wolters Kluwer. Song, J. H., Skoe, E., Banai, K, & Kraus, N. (2012). Training to improve hearing speech in noise: Biological mechanisms. Cerebral Cortex, 22, 1180–1190. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/ bhr196 Tye‐Murray, N. (2020). Foundations of aural rehabilitation: Children, adults, and their families (5th ed., pp. 153–185). San Diego, CA: Plural Publishing. Tyler, R. S., Noble, W., Coelho, C., Roncancio, E. R., & Jun, H. J. (2015). Tinnitus and hyperacusis. In J. Katz, M. Chasin, K. English, L. J. Hood, & K. L. Tillery, Handbook of clinical audiology (7th ed., pp.647–658) Philadelphia: Wolters Kluwer. Uchida, Y., Sugiura, S., Nishita, Y., Saji, N., Sone, M., & Ueda, H. (2019). Age‐related hearing loss and cognitive decline  –  The potential mechanisms linking the two. Auris Nasus Larynx, 46, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anl.2018.08.010 Uhlmann, R. F., Larson, E. B., Rees, T. S., Koepsell, T.D., Duckert, L. G. (1989). Relationship of hearing impairment to dementia and cognitive dysfunction in older adults. JAMA, 261, 1916–1919. PMID: 2926927 Villaume, W. A., Brown, M. H., & Darling, R. (1994). Presbycusis, communication, and older adults. In M. L. Hummert, J. M. Wiemann, & J. F. Nussbaum (Eds.), Interpersonal communication in older adulthood: Interdisciplinary theory and research (pp. 83–106). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Villaume, W. A., & Reid, T. (1990). An initial investigation of aging, aligning actions and presbycusis. JournalofAppliedCommunicationResearch, 18,8–31.https://doi.org/10.1080/00909889009360312 Wayne, R.V., & Johnsrude, I. S. (2015). A review of causal mechanisms underlying the link between age‐related hearing loss and cognitive decline. Aging Research Reviews, 23, 154–166. Doi: 10.1016/j.arr.2015.06.002 World Health Organization. (2012). Hearing loss in persons 65 years and older based on WHO global estimates on prevalence of hearing loss: Mortality and burden of diseases and prevention of blindness and deafness. [Powerpoint slides]. Retrieved from https://www.who.int/pbd/deafness/news/GE_65years.pdf Worthington, D. (2017). Modeling and measuring cognitive components of listening. In D. L Worthington & G. D. Bodie (Eds.), The sourcebook of listening research: Methodology and measures (pp. 70–96). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Yuan, J., Sun, Y., Sang, S., Pham, J.H. & Kong, W.J. (2018). The risk of cognitive impairment associated with hearing function in older adults: A pooled analysis of data from eleven studies Scientific Reports, 8, 2137. Advanced online publication. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598‐018‐20496‐w Zhao, F., & Stephens, D. (2007). A critical review of King‐Kopetzky syndrome: Hearing difficulties, but normal hearing. Audiological Medicine, 5, 119–124. https://doi.org/10.1080/16513860701296421

7

Interpersonal Communication Valerie Manusov

People listen in a variety of ways and in a range of contexts. When individuals listen to one another in an interactive and personal context, their listening can be considered “interpersonal.” Certain forms of interpersonal listening have been shown to enhance persuadability (Ames, Maissen, & Brockner, 2012); increase perceptions of leadership ability (Johnson & Bechler, 1998); deepen our ability to connect to others (Gordon, 2011); allow others to “open up” in ways that are beneficial for them (Miller, Berg, & Archer, 1983); help speakers clarify (and sometimes soften) their attitudes (Itzchakov, DeMarree, Kluger, & Turjeman‐ Levi, 2018); lower their anxiety (Itzchakov, Kluger, & Castro, 2017); and foster forgiveness when the listening is done by the transgressor (Koutsos, Wertheim, & Kornblum, 2008). As such, people generally gauge listening to be a particularly important interpersonal and relational communication undertaking (Bostrom, 1990). This chapter, however, focuses less on the outcomes of listening – or the larger presumption that listening is a skill that we should do well – and more on what listening involves as part of the interpersonal communication process. That is, I emphasize studies on what people do when listening rather than on the many assessments of or arguments for what listening “should” be or what outcomes “good” listening is likely to have, although I do discuss that work as well. In doing so, I privilege the behavioral aspect of listening more than its cognitive or affective components (for an extensive discussion of the full ABCs – affective, behavioral, and cognitive aspects – of listening, see Bodie, 2019), making the argument that listening involves observable action on the part of the listener and that their behavior is tied directly to and integrated with the speaker’s actions. Specifically, I contend that a focus on what it means to listen interpersonally draws attention to the complex dynamics of the communication/interaction process and provides an opportunity to increase our understanding of the enormity (and variety) of what it means to listen in our day‐to‐day lives (see, also, Bodie, 2011a, 2018; Janusik, 2007 for similar arguments). Toward this aim, I embed listening into a conceptualization of interpersonal communication, with an emphasis on what everyday listening may look like and how it reflects more broadly the nature of communicating interpersonally. I then discuss research that focuses on (or around) four additional forms of interpersonal listening reflected in the literature: required listening, relational listening, good listening, and optimal listening. My goal in this review is

The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

104 Manusov to showcase specifically the many ways in which listening occurs behaviorally and interactively so as to illustrate fully the performed nature of interpersonal listening.

Defining Interpersonal Communication and Listening Interpersonal communication has been defined in myriad ways. In this chapter, I define interpersonal communication as an interactive process that occurs between people as they exchange and create messages, collaboratively and interdependently, through an interwoven combination of verbal and nonverbal behavior. Interpersonal communication can occur face‐to‐face, or in mediated environments, such as the mobile phone. I limit mediated interpersonal contexts largely to those where back and forth communication is synchronous and immediate. Moreover, interpersonal communication from this perspective can occur between intimates, strangers, or people with some more formal relationship, such as healthcare recipient/provider or teacher/student. In the following section, I delineate each of the facets of my definition of interpersonal communication and show how interpersonal listening reflects them.

An Interactive Process As with other types of listening, interpersonal listening involves cognition (e.g., paying attention, understanding, receiving, and interpreting messages and, at times, underlying motives and intentions; Burleson, 2011; Jones, 2011) and affect (i.e., how one feels about listening), but, as noted, the interpersonal context, perhaps more than any other, highlights the importance of listeners’ behaviors (Bodie, 2011b). As Bodie (2018) stated, “[w]hen ­people listen [interpersonally], they are not only working on information cognitively but also acting toward another” (p. 6, emphasis added). Whereas in some forms of communication, one person (i.e., a lecturer) talks to others who spend the entire communicative event listening to the speaker (with only minimal response), in interpersonal contexts, interactants constantly enter and exit the roles of speaker and listener as they engage in conversation (Bavelas, Coates, & Johnson, 2000). As Janusik (2007) asserted, “in conversational listening the listener communicates in a transactional context. Message reception is not enough; the listener must respond. Thus, the goals and processes are unique in conversational listening, as interpersonal communication requires one simultaneously to be a sender and receiver” (p. 140). Moreover, for Janusik, this unique context requires the cognition most relevant in interpersonal listening – understanding the speaker’s meaning  –  rather than recall or memory, which are more often the focus of cognitive assessments of listening (Bodie, Worthington, & Fitch‐Hauser, 2011). Our responses are made in light of that understanding. Listening in everyday interaction, therefore, may not seem much like what we think of when we imagine listening to another. It tends to involve what has been described as surface‐level cognitive processing (Burleson, 2011). That is, we are not listening necessarily to another’s problem or story, or to receive ideas or feedback from the other (although we might), situations that typically require greater attention and cognitive and behavioral effort. Rather, the bulk of our listening in our everyday lives is more about the conversational moves that people use without much thought in order to coordinate their social lives. This assertion is consistent with a larger claim made by some interpersonal communication scholars that much, if not most, of our communication is “mundane” (i.e., an ordinary and often unnoticed part of our days; Duck & McMahan, 2010). A focus on the interactive nature of interpersonal listening reflects the larger idea that much of the time we move quickly between roles as speaker and listener (Berger, 2011). But



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when we are largely in the listening role in regular conversation, we are not, as Bavelas et al. (2000) stated, just “speakers‐in‐waiting” (p. 941). Instead, as listeners, we use a variety of behaviors that showcase we are (or are prepared to be) listening. For instance, people use gaze to signal openness to a speaker (or, when speaking, to check to see if we can continue to hold the conversational floor; Bavelas, Coates, & Johnson, 2002; see, also, Ho, Foulsham, & Kingstone, 2015). We also respond with backchannels, a term created to reflect that the speaker is the “main” channel for that moment, while the listener takes a secondary role (Yngve, 1970). These backchannels often signify that we are listening – and are willing to listen – to what another is saying. These two listener behaviors (gaze and backchanneling) often co‐occur. Specifically, Bavelas et al. (2002) found that listeners typically look at speakers; speakers can use this pattern by glancing briefly at the listener, during which time (the “gaze window”) the listener typically offers a quick backchannel, signaling that he or she is still in the listening role. This patterned and integrated sequence works to allow the two interactants to continue their conversation in their respective roles and occurs quickly and beyond the interactants’ awareness. The sequence also illustrates well the interactive nature of interpersonal listening.

Verbal and Nonverbal Messages When communicating interpersonally, people engage in behavior meant to share and create messages, and they do so with verbal (“speech”) and nonverbal (physical and auditory) cues that tend to have shared meanings and functions (Bavelas et  al. 2002; Burleson, 2011). Whereas the participants in this process can (and perhaps should) be identified simply as collaborators in communication, as the movement between their roles changes constantly, we often talk about them based on the role that they are playing at any one time. Specifically, when one person has the speaking “floor,” they are for that period the “speaker,” and the other is momentarily the “listener,” although two people may compete at any moment for the floor (i.e., talking over one another, interrupting), or the non‐speaker may use behavior that reflects they are not accepting the listening role (e.g., looking away or at an object, such as a mobile phone) (Bavelas et al., 2000). When accepting the role of listener, however, it is, as noted, common for the listener to gaze at the speaker much of the time that the speaker is holding the floor (Argyle & Cook, 1976; Kendon, 1967). Even at such time as the roles of listener and speaker seem clear, the “listener” commonly speaks, providing reactions (e.g., saying “I agree!”), backchannels (vocalizations such as “uh huh”; Dixon & Foster, 1998; Yngve, 1970), or asking questions. Indeed, much of what constitutes a perception of another as a “good listener” involves what we more commonly refer to as “speaking” behaviors (Bodie, St. Cyr, Pence, Rold, & Honeycutt, 2012). Likewise, one form of listening – referred to as active or Active‐Empathic Listening (AEL) – is defined in part through the act of verbally paraphrasing what another has said (Drollinger, Comer, & Warrington, 2006; Weger, Castle, & Emmett, 2010; Weger, Castle Bell, Minei, & Robinson, 2014). Ridge (1993) likewise listed five large categories of behaviors that listeners (or “responders”) do in everyday conversation: asking questions; giving feedback “commensurate with the purpose of the speaker” (p. 7); responding in ways consistent with the speaker’s mood; withholding one’s own turn‐at‐talk until the speaker is done; and paraphrasing or “checking back from understanding” (p. 7), reflecting that the listener may both respond verbally and nonverbally. At the same time, a person may “speak” with facial expressions, silence, or other nonverbal cues that keep focus on them as the primary center (speaker) of an interaction even when not talking, and therefore people can “listen” to the nonverbal behavior of others (Yu,  Brown, & Thyer, 2019). For example, Wolff, Marsnik, Tacey, and Nichols (1983)

106 Manusov reported that women who had undergone mastectomies often show nonverbal cues of their emotions and that caregivers can “pick up” those cues and ask about the patients’ feelings to get more information. Similarly, Sparks, Travis, and Thompson (2005) advocated that healthcare professionals listen to caregivers’ use of humor and laughter, as it can indirectly signify any unvocalized concerns that a healthcare provider can elicit. People may also use nonverbal signals for help, rather than requesting support verbally (Whitsett, Almvig, & Shoda, 2010). This argument is part of what Barbee and Cunningham (1995) reference as interactive coping: the “dynamic behavioral process in which one individual responds verbally and nonverbally, in either helpful or unhelpful ways, to another individual’s problem or emotion” (p. 386). Moreover, when a person is speaking, they are using nonverbal cues simultaneously, to which the listener is attending in their role (Bavelas & Gerwing, 2011). This occurrence also illustrates, in a different way, the argument that the terms “speaker” and “listener,” while useful, are somewhat misnomers for what the interactants are actually doing: Both use verbal and nonverbal cues in their roles, often in nuanced ways, and people can “speak” nonverbally and “listen” verbally.

Collaboration and Interdependence Understanding that listeners take an active role in interaction helps illuminate part of what it means to say that interpersonal communication (and therefore interpersonal listening) is collaborative and interdependent. This set of characteristics also make up what others call the transactional nature of interpersonal listening (e.g., Janusik, 2007; Jones, 2011; Keaton, Bodie, & Keteyian, 2015). Collaboration emphasizes that people work together within any conversation to shape what occurs (i.e., they “dialogue” with one another; Clark, 1996; Schober & Clark, 1989). Interdependence signifies that, as they collaborate, people’s behaviors affect the behaviors of others in an interaction. Bavelas and her colleagues contend that the listener is important enough to the overall exchange as to be called a “co‐narrator” (Bavelas et al. 2000; Bavelas & Gerwing, 2011). Asking a particular question, for instance, suggests that a speaker orient the conversation to answering that question; facial expressions of disagreement by the listener may make the speaker adjust how they are telling a story (Manusov & Trees, 2002). Additionally, whether a speaker discloses something private to another person (i.e., “opens up”) can result from the listener’s behavior. To evidence this, Miller et al. (1983) paired people (either high or low disclosures) with a person who was identified as a strong “opener” (i.e., is able to get people to self‐disclose to him or her) or a weak opener. The authors found that people who tend to self‐disclose will do so regardless of the way the other acts, but those less likely to disclose in general did so more often with the strong openers. That is, in some cases, what the listeners did influenced whether or not speakers disclosed in an interaction. Similarly, Pasupathi and Rich (2005) reported that people telling a story to a friend about a recent event that had happened to them found it more difficult to verify their self‐perception in talk when listeners acted “inattentive” (but not when they acted “disagreeable”). Mutual verification of identities is a fundamental part of interpersonal engagement goals (Swann, 1996), and the listener can play a large role in how effectively that occurs. Likewise, Bavelas et al. (2000) were interested in the nature of “microsocial” (i.e., small, quick) processes that a listener performs when engaged in dialogue with another. They noted two primary types: generic responses are the most common form and include actions such as nodding and vocalizations such as mmm‐hmm; specific responses are actions “sensitive to the intricacies of the narrative,” such as wincing in reaction to a part of the teller’s story or narrative (Bavelas et al., 2000, p. 950) and tend to occur later in an interaction, as the listener learns more about the event being discussed. In this study, one person in each dyad was asked to tell a “close‐call” story. When those assigned to be listeners were distracted by something in the



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setting, they used fewer responses of either type but, most notably, fewer specific responses. The speakers in those cases told stories that were judged to be lower in quality. In particular, they were not as likely to build up a story’s dramatic end. The authors argued that the speakers’ story‐telling ability was dampened by having what seemed to be a less engaged listener, reflecting the interdependent nature of conversation. In these co‐occurring and changing roles, interactants’ behaviors affect one another and influence the flow and content of the conversation. Mandelbaum (1989) noted that listeners “have resources with which they may actually initiate and work through with the teller [speaker] a change in the nature of the storytelling while the storytelling is in progress” (p. 114), and Bolden and Mandelbaum (2017) showed how a “listener” laughing and mocking re‐directed how the rest of the telling unfolded. Similarly, Manusov (1996) found that speakers used accounts (i.e., verbal offerings for a perceived wrongdoing) in an interaction that they “picked up” from a listener in a previous interaction, and Manusov and Trees (2002) reported that negatively‐valenced nonverbal listening cues tended to lead to the speaker offering more negative or aggravating accounts. Together, these studies reflect that “listening” in interpersonal contexts is an active process that includes talk and nonverbal behavior, occurs in all interactions between people, co‐occurs with our turns as speakers, and is influential in directing the flow and outcome of conversations.

Forms of Interpersonal Listening The focus on interpersonal listening allows a greater illustration of what such listening “looks like” in our everyday lives. This focus suggests that people often listen automatically and habitually (both in form and in type; Gearhart, Denham, & Bodie, 2014) as they engage in interactions across the course of a day. But a focus on interpersonal listening also allows for scrutiny of particular communicative/listening environments (e.g., required and relational listening) or judgments about listening (good and optimal). Below, I discuss some of these particular interpersonal listening forms.

Required Listening There are moments in our interactions with others that urge us to play the listening role specifically. I call these “required” forms of listening, as there is typically a social and relational expectation or mandate that a person engages in them when made aware that someone else has a listening need. These moments tend to involve what Burleson (2011) identified as depth processing, signifying that more cognitive effort is typically necessary. For instance, Jones (2011) made the argument that “compared to other interpersonal listening contexts (e.g., listening for directions, conversational listening, listening in conflicts), supportive listening requires that the listener pay particular attention to emotional cues” (p. 91, emphasis added). Vora and Vora (2008) also pointed to conversations with people who are dying as important contexts where listening is seen as needed, stating “[o]ne of the most important needs of the dying person is to feel heard and to maintain human connection” (p. 60). Although these contexts – social support and encounters with those who are dying – are only two of the situations in which we are urged to listen, they provide an opportunity to understand more generally what occurs when people are encouraged, by societal and often relational norms, to play a specified listener role.

Support Encounters

One of the most common required listening situations is when another person needs some kind of social support for a difficulty they are facing. According to Trees (2000), “social support refers to verbal and nonverbal cues communicating affirmation, caring, and/or

108 Manusov assistance to an individual dealing with a problem or stressful event” (p. 240). When a person signals that they need another’s help, particularly for something that is emotional and/or difficult for that person, the individual who was signaled may then become a support provider. The would‐be provider first needs to “listen” to determine that a person requires support – such indications can be verbal or nonverbal, communicated directly or indirectly (Barbee & Cunningham, 1995; Whitsett et al., 2010). Although not every person offers support when faced with someone in need, and whereas people provide an array of reasons for choosing not to provide support (Ray, Manusov, & McClaren, 2019), individuals often take action based on the knowledge that another seeks (or needs) their help or comfort. As with other forms of listening, the support provider role often requires speaking (e.g., asking questions, offering sympathy, suggesting solutions), though it is conceptualized as primarily a listening task, one that can bring benefits to the support seeker, including helping to reappraise the troubling event and offering interpersonal warmth through nonverbal immediacy (involvement) cues (Burleson & Goldsmith, 1998; Keaton et al., 2015). More importantly, in her article on supportive listening, Jones (2011) highlighted that listening in the context of social support is, and should be understood as, an interpersonal act. For Jones: [s]upportive listening and emotional support…are dyadic: It takes one to talk, one to attend, and a message to attend to. A second and related point is that both listening and emotional support are interdependent processes that unfold over time. What the support seeker discloses influences the supporter’s response and vice versa. We must examine dyadic interactions in order to capture the complex nature of both listening and providing emotional support. (p. 91)

In doing so, a range of interaction cues have been identified as communicating support by “listeners” (i.e., support providers). Trees (2000), for example, found that vocal warmth/ interest, kinesic/proxemic attentiveness, and movement synchrony predicted young adult children’s perceptions of their mothers’ supportiveness when having a conversation about a relationship problem (see also Bippus, 2001). One specific form of verbal support that listeners may provide is referred to as person‐centered emotional support or the degree to which messages attend explicitly to the thoughts and feelings of a distressed other (Burleson, 2003). Messages higher in person centeredness are thought to work by encouraging speakers to think differently (reappraise) the distress they are experiencing (Burleson & Goldsmith, 1998; Goldsmith, 1994). According to Jones and Wirtz (2006), verbal “appraisal‐based comforting suggests that emotional support is a gradual process that is discursively constructed both by the helper and the distressed person” (p. 219; emphasis in original) and as such illustrates well its interpersonal nature. Cutrona (1996) added that it is not just the use of certain messages or cues that are seen as supportive: The behaviors also need to be “sensitive and well‐timed” (p. 175), a claim made similarly by Jones and Wirtz (2006), and one suggestive of the idea that we value some forms of listening more than others.

Final Conversations

At some point, most of us will serve as support providers. A more infrequent kind of “required” listening occurs when a person we know is dying. Keeley and Yingling (2007) called the interactions we have with people who are dying “final conversations.” As Manusov and Keeley (2015) noted: certain moments are likely to be particularly ripe for communication exchanges that urge us to make meaning from them. One such period occurs when people are aware that someone close to them is dying, and they have the opportunity to engage in end‐of‐life conversations. (pp. 377–378)

Such conversations are opportunities for the dying (the “speakers”) to explore and, in some cases, make peace with their lives (Keeley, 2004).



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The role of the listener in final conversations may be more typical of how we often imagine listening to function in that a “silent presence may prove more helpful than well‐meant counsel” (Vora & Vora, 2008, p. 60). That is, often what people want at end‐of‐life is to have others just “be there” for (and often listen to) them (e.g., Woodgate, 2006). Vora and Vora (2008) argued that the end‐of‐life context provides an opportunity for a specific kind of interpersonal listening, which they call perspective‐taking listening. For these authors, “perspective‐taking listening focuses all the attention on the perspective of the other person, especially in situations when the listener’s own perspectives or feelings are challenged” (p. 67). The verbal messages that tend to be communicated to a listener in final conversations vary, but the primary ones are (from the perspective of the listener, at least) love, identity, religion/ spirituality, routine/everyday content, and difficult relationship issues (Keeley, 2007). In some cases, however, the dying may no longer be able to speak and/or they rely on nonverbal means of communication. As discussed, the role of the “listener” in such cases is to “pick up” the messages they believe the dying person is sending. Manusov and Keeley (2015) found that the functions of the nonverbal cues that those who engaged in final conversations “heard” in the nonverbal cues of the dying person were: ●● ●● ●●

●● ●●

relational messages (i.e., how the dying felt about the listener), emotional expression (i.e., how the person dying was feeling), interaction management (i.e., showing that the dying was still aware of ongoing conversation and activity), social support (i.e., needing aid or comfort), and transitioning (i.e., helping to let go of life).

Overall, and whereas listening is something that we do across our interpersonal interactions, there are certain communicative environments that encourage us to play that role more directly. Both social support and final conversations provide clear examples of how important listening is when people are really in need.

Relational Listening A focus on interpersonal listening, and particularly on the social requirement to listen in certain conditions, points in an additional direction: toward close relationships and/or to functions of listening that enhance a sense of relatedness. Indeed, both social support and engagement with final conversations are typically done in the context of close relationships (Keeley, 2004). Although we can communicate interpersonally, as defined in this chapter, with strangers or acquaintances, scholars who research interpersonal communication often study behavior within the bounds of close, intimate, or personal relationships (for review see Solomon & Vangelisti, 2010). Looking specifically at listening in relationships adds to our understanding of both what people do and what effects those processes may have. It also shows that listening to those with whom we have close ties may be a form of relational “currency” that we expect to exchange with one another and has message value if we choose to (or not to) engage in it. Halone and Pecchioni (2001) stated that “[a]rguably, listening could be viewed as one of – if not the most – mundane of everyday relational activities” (p. 60), a set of processes tied to relational development, maintenance, and decline. That is, listening is fundamental to relational life. Relational listening has been found to occur at the micro‐level (e.g., gaze) as well as at more macro‐levels (e.g., being attentive). Halone and Pecchioni also asserted that centering on relational listening as a particular form helps determine what makes for good or competent listening of this type and how it may differ in expectation and form from other listening processes. In particular, when they asked what “really listening” means in the context of close relationships, participants listed things that people “are” or bring to an interaction

110 Manusov (e.g., “a willingness to be open”), as well as what they do during (e.g., not interrupt, notice nonverbal cues), and subsequent to the conversation (e.g., remember, act on the information that arises). The authors created a model for these three aspects of relational listening, which they called pre‐interaction, interaction, and post‐interaction processes. Halone and Pecchioni’s (2001) model of relational listening foregrounds the idea that people orient differently to engaging in the listening process, including how willing they are to listen to a relational partner, consistent with the cognitive and affective aspects of listening (Coakley, Halone, & Wolvin, 1996) and with the idea that diverse interpersonal contexts tend to elicit certain communicator goals. Gearhart, Denham, and Bodie (2014), for example, evidenced that people, while often reporting preferred modes or styles of listening, engage in a range of ways depending on situational needs. That is, people tend to communicate, in part, based on the goals that a situation requires and, as such, use different modes of listening as necessitated by the situation (i.e., listening is goal‐driven behavior). One such goal that people may have, even when not communicating with a close other, is a relational goal, “which describes concern with and awareness of others’ feelings and emotions” (Keaton et al., 2015, p. 482). Gearhart et al. (2014) likewise noted that “a fundamental goal of listening involves connecting with others emotionally and attempting to understand how they feel” (p. 670). Floyd (2014) argued that acting on these goals (i.e., choosing to listen to another) also has message value: When we listen to others, we offer not only our time but also our psychological presence, our cognitive attention, and our emotional responsiveness, all of which are finite and thus valuable interpersonal resources. Extending the effort to listen to someone may therefore be conceptualized as an expression of affection for that person, at least in situations when listening is not otherwise expected or compensated (e.g., as with a therapist). (p. 2, emphasis added)

Even those whose role it is to listen are aware of the potential for listening to be a relational act. Cowen et al. (1979), for instance, noted that hairdressers believe that listening to their clients is part of their role and a way to show that they care (see, also, storycorps.org/ animation/listening‐is‐an‐act‐of‐love/). But not all such acts may be positive. Doohan (2007) coded interactions of spouses talking to one another about a difficulty (i.e., an area of relational conflict), with an observer present. She found that, overall, couple members showed nonverbal cues of both involvement and negativity when listening to their partners. Husbands’ listening with negative cues was associated with their relational satisfaction (i.e., husbands who were less happy in their relationships tended to act more negatively while listening than did those who were more satisfied, although overall all spouses did this). Interestingly, Doohan made the argument that they may have done so to “perform” their negativity to the observer. That is, they seemed to want to communicate how negative they felt toward what their wives were saying in a manner that was evident to a relational outsider, an argument also forwarded by Bavelas, Black, Chovil, Lemery, and Mullett (1988). How people listen may also change over the course of a relationship. Pasupathi, Carstensen, Levenson, and Gottman (1999) argued that people can listen with more or less attentiveness and/or with more or less positivity to their relational partners. Whereas studies of younger (newer) couples show that those happier in their marriages tend to be (or report being) more attentive/positive listeners compared to those who are unhappy, the authors hypothesized that the same pattern would not necessarily remain over time. In their study of 79 couples (younger and older/longer‐married, satisfied and dissatisfied), Pasupathi et al. found that the patterns for positivity in listening (i.e., that it was associated with satisfaction) were the same for short‐ and long‐time married couples, but attention (or being responsive) was lower for those in long‐term marriages, regardless of satisfaction level, as relational norms and expectations shifted to make such behavior non‐problematic.



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Additional research has shown that relationships may also play a role in shaping our attitudes toward listening. Ledbetter and Schrodt (2008) assessed whether people had families with either high or low conversation orientations. In “high conversation orientations, family members interact frequently and thrive on open and direct discussions of even highly controversial topics” (p. 391), whereas low conversation families restrict and discourage communal interaction. Importantly, the authors found that those with high conversation orientations also had significantly lower listening anxiety, suggesting that people’s affect toward listening can be the product of our first primary relationships. Altogether these findings reflect a vital interconnection between relationships and listening.

Good Listening Reviewing the literature on required and relational listening suggests that there are forms of listening that are evaluated more or less positively (i.e., we assess listening to others in need and with whom we are close as valuable for us and others). Focusing on interpersonal listening, then, often is accompanied by judgments of that communication, implying that listening can be done more or less well, be more or less effective, or be assessed as more or less “good.” As such, listening behavior reflects that we hold particular values for what we want someone to do when they listen to us, and we tend to discern whether we believe a person has played the role of listener well (Halone & Pecchioni, 2001; Manusov, Stofleth, Harvey, & Crowley, 2018). We also tend to feel good when they have done so (Itzchakov et al., 2018). Moreover, we generally prefer people we deem to be “good listeners” (Bodie et al., 2012), although what a person listening well does may not look the way we might expect. According to Itzchakov et al.: high‐quality listening does not necessarily convey agreement with the speakers’ attitudes, but rather involves signals of alertness and responsiveness that cue speakers that what they have to say is valuable and worth consideration (Pasupathi & Hoyt, 2010). Support for this notion comes from work about intellectual humility. When people feel they are being heard and understood, they tend to experience an increase in intellectual humility, one consequence of which is people’s acknowledgment of their own limitations and the recognition that they might be wrong (Reis, 2017). (Itzchakov et al., 2018, p. 762)

From this perspective, good listening is equated with engaged and/or attentive listening. Pasupathi and Rich (2005), for instance, argued that good listening is attentive and positive, and Bavelas et  al. (2000) defined it as engaged and oriented to the other. In addition to engagement and attentiveness, other researchers have emphasized empathy (i.e., “one’s effort to adopt the perspective and infer the experiences – the emotional experiences, usually – of another”; Floyd, 2014, p. 5). For Itzchakov et al. (2017), quality listening is empathic, non‐ judgmental, and respectful. More broadly, Ridge (1993) described good listening as “considerate.” In a more developed conception of what counts as a uniquely good or effective listening form tied to empathy, Drollinger et  al. (2006) offered what they call AEL. Bodie, Vickery, Cannava, and Jones (2015) stated that “most treatments [of AEL] stress the importance of both nonverbal and verbal behaviors that function to demonstrate attention, understanding, responsiveness, and empathy; to encourage continued expression of thoughts and feelings; and to aid in relational maintenance” (p. 153), with extended verbal cues, such as paraphrasing, most central to judgments of active‐empathic listeners. Bodie (2018) and Bodie, Vickery et al., (2015) modeled the AEL process and found that it includes three stages: sensing (i.e., active decoding of message content and emotions), responding (i.e., using verbal and nonverbal cues actively to reflect that one is listening), and processing, or “synthesizing conversational

112 Manusov information and remembering conversational fragments to enable the construction of a ­narrative whole” (Bodie, Worthington, Imhof, & Cooper, 2008, p. 87). AEL has been found to have a number of effects and connections with other variables perceived to be prosocial. For example, Manusov et  al. (2018) and Jones and colleagues (e.g., Jones, Bodie, & Hughes, 2016; Jones & Hansen, 2015) found that AEL is related positively, albeit complexly, with self‐ reported social skill and mindfulness (see also Jones & Mulawa, this volume). The focus on the quality rather than the process of listening has resulted in a tendency to equate listening with skill. Whereas I argue in this chapter that a focus on interpersonal listening emphasizes listening as a complex set of processes, people do also judge the quality of another’s listening as it occurs in interaction and often equate it with communicative ability. For instance, Purdy (1991) asserted that “among the basic skills we need for success in life, listening is primary” (p. 4), and Zakahi and Goss (1995) stated that “skillful listeners accurately interpret and assign meaning to messages, and are responsive participants in conversations” (p. 79). Lawrence et al. (2008) asserted, more specifically, that listening can be seen as a relational skill. Such assessments of skill or aptitude are consequential. Zakahi and Goss (1995), for ­instance, noted that better listening skills allow people to “affiliate with others and become a part of social life. Because effective listeners should be more skillful communicators we would expect them to be less lonely than those who are not as effective” (p. 79). People perceived as good interpersonal listeners are also more likely be liked and perceived as attractive (Argyle & Cook, 1976) and are seen as more trustworthy (Mechanic & Meyer, 2000). Such judgments about and consequences of a person’s listening ability are embedded into larger, more general, ­competence assessments (Bodie, Pence et al., 2015). Bodie (2018), for example, argues that judgments of communication competence – and subsequently of effective listening – include assessments of the affective quality of listening. That is, we judge people as competent ­communicators (and, more specifically, as good listeners) when they show us that they are ­positively disposed to listening to us.

Optimal Listening The idea that listening and listeners can be judged “for better or worse” also implies that there may not just be better listening. For some, there may be a “best” or optimal way to listen, and scholars have advocated for people to engage in such listening in certain interactions. More than any other form of interpersonal listening, however, optimal listening is likely to take a great deal of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral energy and, as such, cannot be the “default” for most people in most contexts (Berger, 2011; Burleson, 2011; Greene & Herbers, 2011). Such moments of listening may also call for the listener role to be more clearly defined than occurs in other listening forms. I discuss a few of these proposed forms of optimal interpersonal listening.

Dialogic Listening

Most of the calls to encourage optimal interpersonal listening are tied to philosophies that urge us to maximize our connection to others (e.g., dialogic). Specifically, Buber’s (1998) dialogical approach “advocates a kind of presence to other beings in which one is receptive and open to being influenced by them” (Gordon, 2011, p. 207). Whereas Buber (1998) did not talk about listening explicitly, Gordon (2011) made a case for listening as an implied – and essential – part of Buber’s (1998) promotion of interpersonal dialogue. For Buber, to truly listen entails being present to the other, that is, responding to the other as a whole person and creating a space in which the other can speak their own words and meaning. When one is open to the other’s being, one does not try to speak for the other or to impose one’s own language, concepts, and interpretive schemes on the other.



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From Buber’s (1998) perspective, genuine listening involves encouraging the other to c­ reate their own meanings, which may be very different from one’s own (p. 207). Similarly, Shotter (2009) asserted: [t]here is a certain kind of moment in human affairs, when a second person spontaneously responds to the utterances (or other expressions) of a first – by both listening and responsively replying – that a “living connection” between them both can be created, a moment that, following Bakhtin (1986), we might call a “dialogical moment” – or which, originally, I called a moment of “joint action”…and later, an “interactive moment.” (p. 220)

Moreover, engaging in this form of listening can be seen as a deeply ethical act: If I need you in order to be me, if my appearance in the human world as another person of worth depends upon your responsiveness to my expressions, then, strange though it may seem, ethical values are prior to, not a consequence of, our knowledge of the others and othernesses around us. (Shotter, 2009, p. 21)

For both Gordon (2011) and Shotter (2009), then, dialogic listening is “optimal” in that it allows for connection and engagement with another in a fundamental – and deeply human – way.

Mindful Listening

Other researchers call for people to listen with purpose and openness, not just in certain moments but in our everyday lives. Specifically, mindfulness, which is thought of as “a receptive state of mind, wherein attention is kept to a bare registering of the facts observed…the basic capacities for awareness and attention permit the individual to be present to reality… rather than react to it or habitually process it” (Brown, Ryan, & Creswell, 2007, p. 212), has been presented as a way that people can “show up” to interactions with others differently than they may do ordinarily or habitually. The general concept of mindfulness has been applied specifically to listening. For example, Chapman (2012) described “mindful listening” as “pay[ing] attention with the presence of our awake body, the empathy of our tender heart, and the curiosity of our open mind” (p. 50). Shafir (2008) wrote likewise that mindful listening is a way of approaching another and an interaction (i.e., as an attitude or state of mind) that allows the mindful listener to attend to fleeting nonverbal cues that “gives richness and depth to the spoken words” (p. 218). Bright, Boland, Rutherford, Kayes, and McPherson (2012) identified one form of listening that therapists may use with their clients, an active and mindful mode, with “techniques” that include prioritizing listening, allowing silence, and “listen[ing] for what’s not said, delving below the superficial” (Bright et al., 2012, p. 1000). Whereas it is possible for anyone to listen mindfully, people who are more mindful (i.e., have greater mindfulness) also, arguably, are more likely to be able to listen in this optimal way (Huston, 2016; Ucok, 2006). Two studies have investigated the relationship between mindfulness and listening, using the AEL Scale (AELS; Bodie, 2011a). Both, however, found somewhat mixed results. Jones et  al. (2016) discovered that certain aspects of mindfulness (specifically mindful observing and describing) predicted higher scores on the AELS, but one factor (non‐judgment) predicted lower scores. Manusov et al. (2018) discerned that mindfulness mediated the positive relationship between the ability to express oneself verbally and the AELS but also the negative relationship between decoding others’ words and the AELS.

Interpersonal Transcendence

In addition to dialogic and mindful listening, Greene (Geiman & Greene, 2018; Greene & Herbers, 2011) proposed a form of optimal listening that is part of what he and his colleagues

114 Manusov reference as interpersonal transcendence. For Greene and Herbers, transcendent interactions are those in which interactants are “absorbed” in their conversation and “experience a sense of discovery, creation, and a feeling of connection, or ‘sharedness,’ that could only be achieved via interaction with another” (p. 67). More specifically: [t]he particular focus and point of departure for our theorizing is a listening phenomenon ­characterized by maximal receptivity and engagement with one’s interlocutor  –  what we term “transcendence.” We conceive of transcendence as a special case of the more general category, “listening phenomena,” where transcendence might be thought of as “listening in the extreme.” (Greene & Herbers, 2011, p. 67)

Interpersonal transcendence is similar to the process of flow (Csikszentmihalyi & Larson, 1987), where people become fully engaged in what they are doing and find it deeply fulfilling. In the case of interpersonal transcendence, the activity in which people are engaging is a conversation. Geiman and Greene (2018) found that people have different dispositions toward the experience of interpersonal transcendence. They assessed those dispositions and found that they correlated with several listening forms or capacities. In particular, those who had high scores on their assessment of transcendence dispositions were also more likely to have high scores on AELS and to be relational or analytical listeners (measured by the Revised Listening Styles Profile (LSP‐R); Bodie, Worthington, & Gearhart, 2013), suggesting a connection between several forms of listening with the potential to have optimal moments.

Conclusion and a Caveat In this chapter, I have tried to emphasize that interpersonal listening is best viewed as a transactional process in which people engage when in interaction with others, wherein individuals move between episodes of being speaker and listener, and they usually do so effortlessly and efficiently. Indeed, that people in interaction “change roles” from moment to moment suggests that calling one person the “speaker” and one the “listener” creates a somewhat artificial distinction (Berger, 2011). Most notably, a focus on interpersonal listening draws our attention specifically to how people act when listening (Bodie, 2018), in verbal and nonverbal forms, although such listening is also a cognitive and affective endeavor, with certain cognitions (e.g., understanding) and affect (e.g., the desire to listen) particularly relevant to this listening form. These listening cues are largely pragmatic; that is, we just engage with them as part of a role, often with little thought or attention. But these “mundane” forms of listening work as part of the everyday give and take of conversation and as such are invaluable to our ability to engage with and relate to others. We also communicate messages in our choice to listen (or not). For instance, listening to close relational partners can communicate about our affection (or dissatisfaction) with them. We also can listen in ways that make others feel good (or not) about themselves and make others feel good about us (or not). Finally, we listen in “high stakes” moments, communicative situations such as when people need our support or to engage in final conversations. Moreover, we have, in dialogic, mindful, and transcendent forms of listening, an opportunity to really change our lives and the lives of others and to connect deeply to our fellow interactants. Listening is, however, not inherently “good” particularly for the listener. As noted, interpersonal listening has particular import when one person has experienced significant trauma or distress. Being able to disclose about and process difficulties or trauma is something that can be very helpful for the speaker, and the speaker tends to find such conversations cathartic and useful as a means for reappraising the stressor (Caplan, Haslett, & Burleson, 2005; Goldsmith, 2004;



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Pennebaker, 1997). But the same positivity is not always true for the listener. That is, whereas everyday listening requires little cognitive, affective, or behavioral energy (Burleson, 2011), listening in more difficult times takes more personal resources and may prove stressful for the listener, especially if the person is called upon to listen frequently over time (Koenig Kellas, Kranstuber Horstman, Willer, & Carr, 2015; Lewis & Manusov, 2009). Moreover, listening, even in its everyday forms, can cause anxiety for those with an apprehension to listening, and thus can take an affective toll on those in the listening role (Roberts & Vinson, 1998). So, whereas this chapter asserts the nature and importance of interpersonal listening (and even suggests the benefits of optimal listening), it is important to know that listening as part of interpersonal communication can also be costly. Most importantly, however, is the awareness that listening interpersonally is a complex process that is interwoven with the full set of actions (as well as cognitions and affect) that make up our interactive life. It is more/other than a skill, though our listening can be judged as more or less skillful, and we can be judged as a good or poor listener, with all of the benefits or costs that stem from those judgments. Rather, it is a fundamental part of our everyday lives that is integrated into the larger set of social actions in which we engage and, by necessity, is therefore integral to a complete understanding of the nature of interpersonal communicating and relating.

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118 Manusov Keeley, M. P., & Yingling, J. (2007). Final conversations: Helping the living and the dying talk to each other. Acton, MA: VanderWyk & Burnham. Kendon, A. (1967). Some functions of gaze‐direction in social interaction. Acta Psychologica, 26, 22–63. https://doi.org/doi:10.1016/0001‐6918(67)90005‐4 Koenig Kellas, J., Kranstuber Horstman, H., Willer, E. K., & Carr, K. (2015). The benefits and risks of telling and listening to stories of difficulty over time: Experimentally testing the expressive writing paradigm in the context of interpersonal communication between friends. Health Communication, 30, 843–858. https://doi.org/doi:10.1080/10410236.2013.850017 Koutsos, P., Wertheim, E. H., & Kornblum, J. (2008). Paths to interpersonal forgiveness: The roles of personality, disposition to forgive and contextual factors in predicting forgiveness following a specific offence. Personality and Individual Differences, 44, 337–348. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. paid.2007.08.011 Lawrence, E., Pederson, A., Bunde, M., Barry, R. A., Brock, R. L., Fazio, E., Mulryan, L., Hunt, S., Madsen, L., & Dzankovic, S. (2008). Objective ratings of relationship skills across multiple domains as predictors of marital satisfaction trajectories. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 25, 445–466. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407508090868 Ledbetter, A. M., & Schrodt. P. (2008). Family communication patterns and cognitive processing: Conversation and conformity orientations as predictors of informational reception apprehension. Communication Studies, 59, 388–401. https://doi.org/10.1080/10510970802467429 Lewis, T. J., & Manusov, V. (2009). Listening to another’s distress in everyday relationships. Communication Quarterly, 57, 282–301. https://doi.org/10.1080/01463370903107279 Mandelbaum, J. (1989). Interpersonal activities in conversational storytelling. Western Journal of Speech Communication, 53, 114–126. https://doi.org/10.1080/10570318909374295 Manusov, V. (1996). Changing explanations: Investigating the process of account‐making over time. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 29, 155–179. https://doi.org/10.1207/ s15327973rlsi2902_3 Manusov, V., & Keeley, M. P. (2015). When family talk is difficult: Making sense of nonverbal communication at the end‐of‐life. Journal of Family Communication, 15, 387–409. https://doi.org/10.1 080/15267431.2015.1076424 Manusov, V., Stofleth, D., Harvey, J. A., & Crowley, J. P. (2018). Conditions and consequences of listening well for interpersonal relationships: Modeling active‐empathic listening, social‐emotional skills, trait mindfulness, and relational quality. International Journal of Listening, 32, 1–17. https:// doi.org/10.1080/10904018.2018.1507745 Manusov, V., & Trees, A. R. (2002). “Are you kidding me?” The role of nonverbal cues in the verbal accounting process. Journal of Communication, 52, 640–656. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1460‐2466.2002.tb02566.x Mechanic, D., & Meyer, S. (2000). Concepts of trust among patients with serious illness. Social Science & Medicine, 54, 657–668. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0277‐9536(00)00014‐9 Miller, L. C., Berg, J. H., & Archer, R. L. (1983). Openers: Individuals who elicit intimate self‐­ disclosure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44, 1234–1244. https://psycnet.apa.org/ doi/10.1037/0022‐3514.44.6.1234 Pasupathi, M., Cartensen, L. L., Levenson, R. W., & Gottman, J. M. (1999). Responsive listening in long‐married couples: A psycholinguistic perspective. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 23, 173–193. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021439627043 Pasupathi, M.,& Hoyt, T. (2010). Silence and the shaping of memory: How distracted listeners effect speakers’ subsequent recall of a computer game experience. Memory, 18, 159–169. http://doi. org/10.1080/09658210902992917 Pasupathi, M., & Rich, B. (2005). Inattentive listening undermines self‐verification in personal storytelling. Journal of Personality, 73, 1051–1086. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467‐6494.2005.00338.x Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Opening up: The healing power of expressing emotions. New York: Guilford. Purdy, M. (1991). Listening and community: The role of listening in community formation. International Listening Association, 5, 51–67. https://doi.org/10.1207/s1932586xijl0501_4 Ray, C. D., Manusov, V., & McClaren, R. (2019). “Emotional support won’t cure cancer”: Reasons people give for not providing emotional support provision. Western Journal of Communication, 83, 20–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/10570314.2018.1472800



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8

Language Learning Nicole Altvater‐Mackensen

Babies appear to understand little of the speech that is addressed to them. Yet, their linguistic abilities develop quickly. Around their first birthday, infants utter their first word (Fenson et al., 1994), by two years of age toddlers already know, on average, more than 300 words (Bates et al., 1994), and kindergarten children can astonish listeners with their narrative skills (Paul & Smith, 1993). These productive milestones are unequivocal evidence that language development has taken off. But how does listening and the perception of speech change ­during this fast – and seemingly effortless – acquisition of a child’s native language? This chapter reviews the role of listening in language learning and traces the development of speech perception from the prenatal phase to early school age. I focus on experimental findings that illustrate developmental changes in phonological processing and learning. Obviously, language learning includes much more than just sounds and words. But phonological and lexical learning arguably form the basis of early language development and prominently include listening processes. Following the developmental trajectory from the earliest listening experiences to literacy, I address how: (i) prenatal experience shapes neonatal listening; (ii) perception attunes to the native language in infancy; (iii) lexical knowledge emerges and shapes listening in toddlerhood; (iv) pre‐literate listening capacities form a basis for the development of reading and writing; and (v) the social context modulates the early stages of language learning.

Prenatal Experiences Shape Listening Preferences in the Newborn The developmental trajectory of language learning starts well before birth. Even though the fetus is shielded from the outside world, substantial auditory information reaches the amniotic cavity. The developing auditory system is able to process – at least part of – this stimulation in the last trimester of pregnancy (for review see Querleu, Renard, Versyp, Paris‐ Delrue, & Crèpin, 1988). Indeed, there is increasing evidence that prenatal exposure shapes neonatal listening and induces auditory learning. Initial support for this view came from a study showing that three‐day‐old neonates prefer to listen to their mother’s voice compared to an unfamiliar female voice irrespective of the amount of postnatal contact with the mother (DeCasper & Fifer, 1980). The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

122 Altvater-Mackensen Even more striking, fetuses also attune to what their mothers say. Prosodic information (i.e., information related to stress patterns and intonational contours) seems particularly salient. When mothers repeatedly read a story in the last weeks of pregnancy, the newborn recognizes fragments of this story after birth (DeCasper & Spence, 1986). Such fetal learning extends to global characteristics of the maternal language. Newborns prefer human speech over equally complex speech analogues (Vouloumanos & Werker, 2007), and they exhibit distinct neural processing patterns for regular speech as opposed to backward‐played speech (Peña et  al., 2003). Next to these general preferences, newborns prefer their native language over a non‐ native language with different stress patterns (Moon, Cooper, & Fifer, 1993). The auditory learning of native prosodic patterns is also reflected in newborns’ cry melody (Mampe, Friederici, Christophe, & Wermke, 2009) and in their more pronounced neural reaction to familiar intonation contours (Partanen et  al., 2013). This emerging knowledge about native prosody might help newborns extract information from the speech stream. At the word level, newborns discriminate native multisyllabic words based on their stress pattern (Sansavini, Bertoncini, & Giovanelli, 1997) and even distinguish between different word classes, such as function words like the and content words like cat (Shi, Werker, & Morgan, 1999). They further show sensitivity to the acoustic cues that signal word boundaries (Christophe, Dupoux, Bertoncini, & Mehler, 1994) and to syllable repetitions within words, like mubaba vs. mubage (Gervain, Macagno, Cogoi, Peña, & Mehler, 2008). Listening and learning in the womb seems even to extend to the level of individual sounds. Intelligibility tests with adults suggest that intra‐uterine recordings preserve enough information to identify approximately 30% of sounds in a speech stream (Griffiths, Brown, Gerhardt, Abrams, & Morris, 1994). Indeed, fetuses in the last trimester of gestation show modulations in heart rate when presented with different vowel sounds, indicating that they can discriminate the speech sounds (Zimmer et  al., 1993). Findings that newborns show ­different interest for native vowel sound exemplars compared to vowel exemplars of a non‐ native language within the first hours after birth suggest that prenatal language exposure induces phonetic category learning and paves the way for language‐specific speech perception (Moon, Lagercrantz, & Kuhl, 2013). Taken together, empirical evidence shows that the baby begins to learn from surrounding language input well before birth. This prenatal experience supposedly shapes listening preferences and supports the attunement of speech processing in infancy (for a discussion of biological predispositions and experience‐related development, see Werker & Tees, 1992).

Infants’ Perception Attunes to the Native Language While the newborn is not a blank slate when it comes to speech perception, they are far from being a mature language listener. Over the course of the first year of life, speech perception undergoes considerable restructuring and adapts to the characteristics of the native language. The languages in the world have different sound inventories (i.e., they use different sets of sounds to form words). For example, English contrasts /θ/ with /s/: thin and sin have different meanings. The German sound inventory does not contain /θ/, and German listeners often fail to perceive (and accurately produce) the difference between /θ/ and /s/ (Hanulikova & Weber, 2012). Such language‐specific listening patterns are a consequence of adaptations in speech perception across the first year of life, a process termed native language attunement (Aslin & Pisoni, 1980). In a formative study, Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk, and Vigorito (1971) found that one‐ month‐old infants perceive speech sounds categorically; that is, they detect acoustic differences that cross a category boundary better than within‐category differences. For example, /b/ and /p/ differ mainly in voice onset time (VOT), the time when the vocal cords start



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vibrating with respect to the closure. The critical boundary for English is at approximately 25 ms, with VOT < 25 ms perceived as /b/ and VOT > 25 ms perceived as /p/. Eimas and colleagues presented infants with sounds that varied in 20 ms with respect to VOT. Their results showed that infants readily detect a 20 ms difference in VOT when it crosses the ­category boundary (e.g., the difference between /b/ with 20 ms VOT and /p/ with 40 ms VOT), but they fail to detect a similar 20 ms difference in VOT when it falls within one category (e.g., the difference between /p/ with 60 ms VOT and /p/ with 80 ms VOT). Thus, even though the acoustic difference is the same in both conditions, the perceptual system reacts differently. This categorical perception allows listeners to focus on relevant acoustic differences while ignoring variance that is not meaningful in the ambient language. Subsequent studies showed that infants are initially sensitive to a variety of sound contrasts, including both native and non‐native sounds, but eventually lose sensitivity to non‐native contrasts between 4 and 10 months of age for vowels (Polka & Werker, 1994) and between 6 and 12 months of age for consonants (Werker & Tees, 1984). These findings suggest that infants are born as universal listeners who perceive all sound contrasts from the languages of the world, but that over time they narrow their perception to become native listeners who are only sensitive to sound contrasts used in their native language (Werker & Tees, 1999). Not all sound contrasts follow this developmental path, however. When two non‐native sounds can be assimilated into distinct native categories or are very different from any native sound, such as African click sounds for Western listeners, infants and adults maintain their ability to discriminate a non‐native sound contrast (Best, McRoberts, & Goodell, 2001; Best, McRoberts, LaFleur, & Silver‐Isenstadt, 1995). Furthermore, some native contrasts are initially not discriminated very well, and infants considerably improve their sensitivity to these contrasts in the first year of life (Kuhl et  al., 2006). This includes sound contrasts that are acoustically less salient (Eilers, Wilson, & Moore, 1977; Aslin, Pisoni, Hennessy, & Perey, 1981) or that have low frequency in the ambient language input (Anderson, Morgan, & White, 2003; Narayan, Werker, & Speeter Beddor, 2010). When we consider the typical environment, most speech input to infants is provided in face‐ to‐face interaction and consequently entails bimodal information from the face and the voice. Thus, it might be expected that infants adapt their perception not only to the acoustic but also to the visual characteristics of their native language. Indeed, infants are sensitive to the congruency between auditory and visual speech cues from 2 to 4 months of age: they prefer to look at silent speaking faces whose articulations are congruent with a heard sound relative to incongruent articulations (Kuhl & Meltzoff, 1982; Patterson & Werker, 2003). Paralleling the development of auditory speech perception, audiovisual speech perception undergoes significant development in the first year of life. While 4‐ to 6‐month‐old infants discriminate native and non‐native language based on silent articulations alone, they lose sensitivity to visual differences between languages by 8 months of age, unless they are exposed to both languages (Weikum et  al., 2007). Similarly, their sensitivity to the correspondence between auditory and visual speech cues declines for non‐native sounds over the first year of life (Pons, Lewkowicz, Soto‐Faraco, & Sebastián‐Gallés, 2009). At the same time, infants refine their perception of native audiovisual contrasts (Altvater‐Mackensen, Mani, & Grossmann, 2016) and exploit visual cues to support auditory phonetic learning (Teinonen, Aslin, Alku, & Csibra, 2008) and processing (Bristow et al., 2008). While these findings indicate that infant speech perception is inherently multimodal from early on, they do not necessarily imply that infants automatically integrate auditory and visual information. Evidence for limited integration comes from studies showing that infants only detect temporal asynchrony between auditory and visual speech streams when the lag between signals is more than half a second (Lewkowicz, 2000), and from studies finding considerable variation in the likelihood to fuse auditory and visual cues into one percept until well into childhood (Desjardins & Werker, 2004; McGurk & MacDonald, 1976).

124 Altvater-Mackensen To summarize, speech perception considerably changes over the course of development, enabling infants to become efficient native language listeners. But how do infants learn which perceptual differences – be they auditory or visual – are associated with distinct sounds of the native language (so called phonemes) and which variance can be ignored? A widely accepted answer is statistical learning. Every realization of a phoneme is slightly different (e.g., due to the surrounding sound context or the speaker’s voice; Peterson & Barney, 1952). The resulting variation is not random but reveals local maxima along relevant phonetic dimensions that characterize different speech sound categories (Allen & Miller, 1999). Such statistical distributions modulate infants’ discrimination of speech sounds (Maye, Werker, & Gerken, 2002), and the idea of distributional learning as the primary mechanism driving native language attunement has been adopted across theories of early speech perception (Werker & Curtin, 2005; Kuhl et al., 2008). Simulations of the developmental process in computational models, however, suggest that sound categories can only be learned successfully when the word context is considered (Feldman, Goldwater, Griffiths, & Morgan, 2013). Behavioral evidence supports this notion as familiarity with two different words that contain two distinct sounds, such as /d/ in dog and /t/ in teddy, strengthens infants’ discrimination of these sounds (Thiessen, 2011). Because infants have been shown to possess basic word knowledge by 6 to 9 months of age (Tincoff & Juszyck, 2012; Bergelson & Swingley, 2012), the developing lexicon may indeed support native language attunement.

Word Learning in Infancy and Toddlerhood Acquiring word knowledge by listening to fluent speech is, however, far from trivial. You can gain an understanding of the complexity of this process when listening to a podcast in a foreign, unfamiliar language. There are no reliable pauses between words in fluent speech, and we rarely utter words in isolation (Aslin, Woodward, LaMendola, & Bever, 1996; but see Brent & Siskind, 2001). Nonetheless, infants learn to segment the speech stream and to recognize different word forms around 7.5 months of age (Jusczyk & Aslin, 1995). Different listening strategies have been found to help infants detect word boundaries, such as attention to the predominant native stress pattern (Jusczyk, Houston, & Newsome, 1999), to prosodic cues marking sentence boundaries (Seidl & Johnson, 2006), or to statistical information about the co‐occurrence of sounds (Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996). The extracted word forms are thought to be stored in a “proto‐lexicon” (Swingley, 2009). This emerging lexical knowledge might be used to bootstrap further learning by drawing attention to familiar patterns in the speech stream. For instance, infants recognize their own name, a highly frequent and salient word in the input, in fluent speech as early as 4 months of age (Mandel, Jusczyk, & Pisoni, 1995). Around 6 months of age, infants can use familiar words like mommy to cue word boundaries, therewith facilitating the segmentation of adjacent words (Bortfeld, Morgan, Golinkoff, & Rathbun, 2005) and enhancing the detection of novel, similar‐sounding words (Altvater‐Mackensen & Mani, 2013a). Such facilitated processing of familiar sound patterns might help explain why toddlers learn new words more easily if they sound similar to words they already know (Newman, Samuelson, & Gupta, 2008) and account for the finding that words in the developing lexicon tend to cluster together in terms of sound similarity (Storkel, 2004). Learning phonological forms is just one side of the coin, however. Infants eventually also need to associate meaning with these forms to become competent language listeners. But how do they infer what a word refers to when there are several possible interpretations? The philosopher Quine (1960) illustrated the indeterminacy of reference in a thought experiment: Imagine being on a foreign island. A native utters “Gavagai!” when a rabbit runs past. When determining the meaning of gavagai you might consider the rabbit itself, specific features of



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its appearance, its movement, or you might interpret it as a warning or call for attention. Different cognitive biases and strategies have been proposed to help the child solve the reference problem and form conceptual categories. Prominent examples include the mutual exclusivity bias (Markman & Wachtel, 1988) and the novel name–nameless category principle (Mervis & Bertrand, 1994), which state that a novel word typically refers to a yet nameless concept and not to a conceptual category for which a word is already known. Similarly, children tend to associate meaning with whole objects rather than parts (Markman, 1990) and have a strong bias toward extending a word to other objects of similar shape (Landau, Smith, & Jones, 1988). Next to such word learning heuristics, children track statistical co‐­occurrences between word forms and objects in the visual scene to acquire new words (Smith & Yu, 2008) and use pragmatic cues from the speaker to infer word meaning (Tomasello & Akjtar, 1995). These strategies allow the child to map labels to their meaning, a process that often requires only one exposure to word form and referent (Heibeck & Markman, 1987). Even though toddlers show astonishing abilities to make sense of the speech stream and to learn new words, they can fail to pay attention to subtle sound detail during listening. In an influential study, Stager and Werker (1997) showed that 14‐month‐olds do not distinguish minimally different words, like bin and din, in an associative word learning task even though they are sensitive to the difference between the two forms in a simple discrimination task. Because more experienced word learners are usually successful when encoding words (Werker, Fennell, Corcoran, & Stager, 2002), researchers have argued that the failure to use detailed sound information during early word learning is a consequence of the high task demands (Werker & Curtin, 2005). Indeed, lowering processing costs through previous familiarity with the to‐be‐learned object (Fennell, 2012) or label (Swingley, 2007) considerably improves infants’ ability to encode the phonological form of words. Once a word is learned, toddlers are highly sensitive to its sound characteristics and spot even subtle mispronunciations (Swingley & Aslin, 2000). For example, when a word is mispronounced, such as pish instead of fish, it takes them longer to find the correct referent. The time course of toddlers’ looking behavior towards potential referents of a word further reveals that the speech input is processed incrementally (Swingley, Pinto, & Fernald, 1999). The child does not wait to hear the full word before searching her mental lexicon. Rather, potential word candidates are continuously activated based on the available input. For instance, upon hearing “b”, matching words such as ball, bed, or bottle are selected. This set of potential word candidates is then narrowed down in the course of word recognition until one candidate is selected as best fitting to the incoming signal. This process of word recognition is rather robust and allows children as young as 19 months to recognize words even when they deviate from the standard pronunciation (Mulak, Best, Tyler, Kitamura, & Irwin, 2013). Interestingly, recognizing a word entails the co‐activation of words that sound similar (Mani & Plunkett, 2011) as well as words with similar meaning (Arias‐Trejo & Plunkett, 2009), leading to activation that cascades through the mental lexicon and that recruits a network of words related on different levels (Altvater‐Mackensen & Mani, 2013b). Even words that only share specific features, such as color (Johnson, McQueen, & Huettig, 2011) or grammatical gender (Bobb & Mani, 2013), are co‐activated. The available signal is further used to predict the upcoming speech information. When listening to the sentence fragment “The boy ate the big…” toddlers as young as 24 months anticipate hearing cake rather than bird (Mani & Huettig, 2012). Taken together, infants and toddlers employ a variety of listening strategies to aid lexical learning, and listening to speech draws on an intricate lexical network and sophisticated processing mechanisms, which support the fast and robust learning of new words in toddlerhood. While the beginnings of word learning are slow and fragile with only 2 words per week at 12 months, vocabulary learning takes off with up to 1 word every 2 hours towards the child’s second birthday (Bloom, 1973).

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Phonological Abilities: A Foundation for Literacy Development Even though it is still a long way from first words to literacy, there seems to be developmental continuity. In particular, toddlers’ sensitivity to the sound structure of words may serve as a predictor for later literacy development. There are considerable individual differences in literacy skills, and an estimated 10% of children have persistent difficulties in the acquisition of reading and writing despite adequate intelligence and schooling (Shaywitz, Escobar, Shaywitz, Fletcher, & Makuch, 1992). The observed difficulties are commonly classified as developmental dyslexia (cf. ICD‐10 of the World Health Organization (WHO)). Learning to read and write are fundamental skills in our knowledge‐based society, and literacy development is an important predictor for academic success and socio‐emotional well‐being (Edwards, 1993; Maughan, 1995). Consequently, substantial research has been undertaken to identify basic abilities that scaffold literacy development (for a general review see Vellutino, Fletcher, Snowling, & Scanlon, 2004). When learning to read and write (at least in alphabetic writing systems), children need to associate the different phonemes of a language with specific graphic symbols, something that requires substantial phonological processing skills. A pre‐requisite to accurately map sounds onto letters is the successful discrimination and categorization of speech sounds. Indeed, categorical perception seems to be hampered in dyslexics (Breier, Fletcher, Denton, & Gray, 2004; de Gelder & Vroomen, 1998), not only for speech but also for non‐speech sounds (Vandermosten et al., 2010). The different listening patterns of dyslexic and normal readers have been attributed to a general deficit in auditory processing of rapid temporal changes in the acoustic signal (Tallal, 1980). Reduced abilities related to basic auditory processing might also contribute to difficulties in developing phonological awareness (Corriveau, Goswami, & Thomson, 2010), or the ability to ignore a word’s meaning and focus solely on its sound structure. Phonological awareness allows us to decide that thin and sin rhyme, that blood and blue have similar onsets, or that banana consists of a sequence of six sounds. As described, words in the toddler lexicon are activated based on phonological (and semantic) overlap, and phonological similarity has been suggested to play a critical role in bootstrapping early vocabulary development. Even infants have been shown to be sensitive to rhyming patterns in the context of nursery songs (Hahn, Benders, Snijders, & Fikkert, 2018). Thus, it may be unsurprising that precursors of phonological awareness develop in toddlerhood, although formal reflections on phonological structure are often seen as a result of literacy (Baron, 1991). Given that reading and writing involve the abilities to identify, analyze, and synthesize sound structure based on written forms, and vice versa (Wagner & Torgesen, 1987), it is plausible that meta‐cognitive awareness of the phonological sound structure of words supports literacy development. The phonological deficit hypothesis (Bruck, 1992) consequently states that children experience an increased risk of developing dyslexia if they have low phonological processing skills and experience problems in identifying and manipulating parts of speech, such as rhymes. Indeed, phonological awareness in toddlers correlates with later literacy development (Näslund & Schneider, 1996; Schneider, Küspert, Roth, Visé, & Marx, 1997). Specifically, rhyming abilities in toddlerhood predict later reading and writing skills (Bryant, MacLean, Bradley, & Crosslan, 1990). Moreover, longitudinal studies have found that children’s rhyming abilities before entering school may serve as a diagnostic tool when assessing the risk of developing dyslexia (Wimmer, Landerl, & Schneider, 1994). In agreement with these findings, the training of phonological awareness in pre‐school children facilitates spelling and writing acquisition in first‐ and second‐graders (Lundberg, Frost, & Petersen, 1988). It should be noted, however, that unequivocal evidence for a causal link between phonological awareness and literacy skills is missing (Castles & Coltheart, 2004), and that a complex interplay between auditory processing, speech perception, and phonological awareness is likely to underlie early literacy skills (Boets et al., 2011).



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Blomert (2011) suggested that learning to read (like acquiring spoken language) is ­inherently multisensory and that children eventually build integrated orthographic‐phonological representations; i.e., representations that include information about both sounds and letters of a word. Consequently, written word recognition during reading is influenced by how words sound (Kriukova & Mani, 2016), and auditory word recognition during listening is influenced by the orthographic form of words (Ziegler & Ferrand, 1998). This extends to the learning of new words: auditory recognition of a newly learned word, such as /kaməd/, is impaired when learners received orthographic information during learning that is inconsistent with the standard spelling, such as (Hayes‐Harb, Nicol, & Barker, 2010). Such influences of orthographic knowledge also become evident in second‐language learning when the perception of non‐native sound contrasts may be facilitated or hindered (Escudero, Hayes‐Harb, & Mitterer, 2008; Escudero & Wanrooij, 2010). Acquiring reading and writing skills might also substantially relate to how children represent words in their mental lexicon. As noted before, toddlers are experts in word learning and have astonishing abilities to segment, store, and access words from fluent speech. It has been argued, however, that representation of the sound structure of words fundamentally changes with development. Some accounts assume that children’s representations of words are initially holistic, and that toddlers’ perception of subtle mispronunciations relies on a ‘phonetic’ (i.e., acoustic rather than abstract) processing mode. In particular, the lexical restructuring model (Metsala & Walley, 1998) proposes that representations become gradually more fine‐grained when the vocabulary grows to allow efficient distinction of similar‐sounding words. In this view, lexical restructuring is a necessary precursor of phonological awareness and literacy. In contrast, psycholinguistic grain size theory suggests that children become aware of the internal sound structure of words only when they start learning letter‐sound‐correspondences. In this view, lexical restructuring is the result rather than the precursor of literacy (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). In summary, toddlers’ language‐specific listening and their awareness of how words sound provide a solid foundation to acquire basic reading and writing skills. When literacy comes into play, the knowledge about letter‐sound correspondences modulates how children listen to speech and potentially how they represent speech in their mental lexicon.

Social Interactions Modulate Speech Perception and Language Learning So far, I have focused on how children listen to speech and learn about a language’s sound structure across early development. Nonetheless, it is clear that language learning and processing is not restricted to the auditory domain – children perceive speech as an inherently multimodal signal quite early in their development. Importantly, language is also a social signal. Most language input to infants and toddlers is provided in direct interactions, providing information from the speaker’s face, voice, and body, and creating opportunities for reciprocal communication. A presumably innate preference for faces (Johnson, Dziurawiec, Ellis, & Morton, 1991), voices (Vouloumanos, Hauser, Werker, & Martin, 2010), and biological motion (Simion, Regolin, & Bulf, 2008) over other types of stimuli reflects the significance of social information sources for development. Indeed, newborns already show enhanced attention to social signals that are directed towards them: they look longer at faces that provide eye contact rather than those with averted gaze or closed eyes (Batki, Baron‐Cohen, Weelwright, Connellan, & Ahluwalia, 2000; Farroni, Csibra, Simion, & Johnson, 2002), and they listen longer to voices that speak in an infant‐directed as compared to an adult‐directed speech style (Cooper & Aslin, 1990). Thus, infants are equipped with “social biases” that might promote language learning.

128 Altvater-Mackensen Evidence for the importance of social interaction for normal language development comes from case studies of children who grew up in social isolation, such as Genie (Fromkin, Krashen, Curtiss, Rigler, & Rigler, 1974), and from institutionalized children who received limited social input (Windsor, Glaze, & Koga, 2007). In such cases, however, it is not only the social context but also language input per se that is diminished. Both quantity (Huttenlocher, Waterfall, Vasilyeva, Vevea, & Hedges, 2010) and quality (Cartmill et al., 2013) of parental language input are predictors of individual differences in language development. It seems that it is not the sheer amount or complexity of the language that children hear, but the “back‐and‐ forth conversations that are both temporally and topically contingent on children’s contribution, [which] are the fuel that prime the learning of language” (Golinkoff, Hoff, Rowe, Tamis‐LeMonda, & Hirsh‐Pasek, 2018, p.2). Kuhl, Tsao, and Liu (2003) provided an impressive demonstration of how social interactions foster language learning. Over a four‐week period, 9‐month‐old English‐learning infants took part in three Mandarin language sessions per week. One group of infants directly interacted with a native Mandarin speaker during joint play sessions. A second group was exposed to a videotape of the speaker recorded during the play sessions, while the third group heard an audiotape. Afterwards infants’ discrimination of a non‐native Mandarin sound contrast was assessed as a measure of language learning. Strikingly, only infants that took part in live interactions showed evidence of learning, even though the (auditory) linguistic input was identical across groups. But why do social interactions create more effective learning environments? One relatively well‐investigated social cue is infant‐directed speech (IDS), a modified speech style that is used to converse with infants (Fernald et al., 1989) and second language learners (Uther, Knoll, & Burnham, 2007). IDS has several characteristics that potentially facilitate language processing when compared to adult‐directed speech, such as higher pitch and more exaggerated pitch contours, slower and more pronounced articulation, and shorter and less complex sentences. Indeed, IDS has been shown to promote the formation of native language sound categories (Cristia, 2013), the segmentation of speech (Singh, Nestor, Parikh, & Yull, 2009), and the learning of first words (Ma, Michnick Golinkoff, Houston, & Hirsh‐Pasek, 2011). The mechanisms through which IDS facilitates learning are still debated. Some researchers have argued that characteristics of the native language are enhanced in IDS which might ease learning (Liu, Kuhl, & Tsao, 2003), while others have stated that IDS mainly serves to focus attention (McMurray, Kovack‐Lesh, Goodwin, & McEchron, 2013). The functional role and the impact of different characteristics of IDS might also change across development (Kalashnikova & Burnham, 2018). As stated, face‐to‐face interactions not only provide information from the voice, but also from the face and body. This includes visual articulatory information from the mouth as well as information about a speaker’s focus of attention through eye gaze and pointing. According to the intersensory redundancy hypothesis (Bahrick & Lickliter, 2012), the reliable pairing of auditory and visual information originating from the same source facilitates processing by focusing attention to relevant aspects of the signal. In line with this notion, adult listeners use visual speech information to enhance speech comprehension in difficult listening situations (e.g., when conversing in a foreign language or at a loud cocktail party; Sumby & Pollack, 1954; Summerfield, 1992). In the course of development, both infants and toddlers show increased attention to a speaker’s mouth during native language attunement (Lewkowicz & Hansen‐Tift, 2012) and during the vocabulary spurt (Hillairet de Boisferon, Tift, Minar, & Lewkowicz, 2018), suggesting that they actively seek additional information in phases of accelerated language learning. Such shifts in attention to the speaker’s mouth have been associated with later language growth (Tenenbaum, Sobel, Sheinkopf, Malle, & Morgan, 2015) and more mature neural processing patterns (Altvater‐Mackensen & Grossmann, 2016). Furthermore, visual articulations facilitate infants’ perception of (native) phonological contrasts (Teinonen, Aslin, Alku, & Csibra, 2008) as well as speech segmentation (Hollich, Newman, & Jusczyk,



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2005); and toddlers represent visual articulatory information during word learning (Havy, Foroud, Fais, & Werker, 2017). Similarly, children use ostensive cues (e.g., eye gaze or pointing) to infer a speaker’s referential intent (for a comprehensive review see Waxman & Lidz, 2006). Eye contact might also increase attention and enhance auditory processing during speech perception (Parise, Palumbo, Handl, & Friederici, 2011). It appears, then, that children exploit information from a speaker’s voice, face, and body for language learning from early on. Such social cues are, however, arguably not the most distinct feature of face‐to‐face interactions. Presumably more defining is the reciprocal nature of social interactions: the infant is not a passive listener, but sends out communicative signals. Such signals are recognized and intuitively answered by the parent, creating a scaffolding frame in which communication can evolve (Papoušek, 2007). The time‐locked and appropriate reaction to the infant’s behavior appears essential to bootstrap learning. Infants with contingently responding mothers show accelerated language development in both speech perception (Elsabbagh et al., 2013) and production (Goldstein, King, & West, 2003). Similarly, toddlers learn successfully not only from live but also from televised tutors if the tutor behaves contingently (Roseberry, Hirsh‐Pasek, & Golinkoff, 2014). Toddlers also pick up new words most efficiently if the mother labels the object that is currently in the child’s focus (Yu & Smith, 2012). While it is mainly the parent who adapts her behavior, infants initiate and actively shape turn‐taking sequences from early on (Gratier et al., 2015). By two years of age, toddlers have fine‐tuned their socio‐pragmatic skills so that they are able to predict upcoming turns in the conversation based on prosodic and lexical‐syntactic information (Lammertink, Casillas, Benders, Post, & Fikkert, 2015). Conversational turns with parents at 4 to 6 years of age have further been linked to advanced language skills and more mature neural processing patterns (Romeo et  al., 2018). Similar results have been obtained for “dialogic reading.” Parents’ engagement with their children during storybook reading (e.g., asking open‐ended questions, relating content to the child’s own life) promotes language development (Whitehurst et al., 1988) and correlates with more mature language processing (Hutton et al., 2017). In brief, the quality of the social context shapes language learning across early development and leads to substantial individual differences in language growth (Hoff, 2006). The mechanisms by which the social environment shapes learning are still not fully understood, but theories of language learning mainly attribute the importance of social interaction to the significance of communicative intentions (usage‐based theory of language acquisition; Tomasello, 2000), to its attention‐modulating function (social gating hypothesis; Kuhl, 2000), and to its scaffolding character (socio‐cultural learning theory; Vygotsky, 1978).

Conclusion The experimental findings described in this chapter trace the development of speech perception from the womb to early school age. I focused on how infants and toddlers listen to language and how their phonological knowledge develops. Even though this is only one part of language acquisition, it forms an important foundation necessary for acquiring higher‐level linguistic structures (cf. Gervain & Werker, 2008). The reported research shows that language listening and learning starts well before birth and that prenatal experiences as well as innate biases prepare infants to quickly tune their perception to the characteristics of the native language within the first year of life. This perceptual reorganization presumably goes hand in hand with the acquisition of (proto‐) lexical knowledge. In toddlerhood, children extend their lexical network and use intricate processing mechanisms when listening to speech. This early development forms a solid foundation for emerging literacy skills. Importantly, across early language learning and listening, social interactions are a modulator and predictor of development, underscoring the dual role of language as cognitive and social means of communication.

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9

Linguistics Vahid Aryadoust, Yuvadarshini Ilang Kumaran, and Stella Ferdinand

Listening comprehension (LC), or how people understand spoken language, is a core ­construct within many branches of applied linguistics. In general, LC is conceptualized as (i) a complex process that involves both bottom‐up (literal) and top‐down (inferential) processes (Brown, 2017) and (ii) an essential skill for language acquisition in both first and second language contexts. As with many other disciplines, however, applied linguistics has not always given LC the focused and sustained attention it deserves. Indeed, although listening is currently recognized as the backbone of first language (L1) and second language (L2) learning (Altvater‐Mackensen, this volume; Vandergrift & Goh, 2012), authors surveying the available research have long lamented that listening has received far less research attention than other language skills (Aryadoust, 2017; Berne, 2004; Brown, 2017; Vandergrift, 2007), resulting in its famous nickname “the Cinderella skill” (Weir, Vidaković, & Galaczi, 2013). The purpose of this chapter is to provide a systematic review of research into LC to identify trends and potential areas for future work. Toward our goal, we adopted a co‐citation review method to measure and synthesize trends in LC research, as well as the impact of publications, authors, and other variables of interest on the evolution of the specialty (Chen, 2016; Lane, 2009; Leydesdorff & Milojević, 2015; Milojević & Leydesdorff, 2013). This approach avoids several limitations of narrative‐based reviews. First, it avoids summarizing a limited pool of selected studies (Kirkevold, 1997) that can constrain the scope and focus of reviews to authors’ own areas of interest, likely resulting in subjectivity and bias (Chen, Ibekwe‐SanJuan, & Hou, 2010). Second, it allows us to specify directed hypotheses and research questions and thus better “reveal how…decisions were made about relevance of studies and the validity of the included studies” (Collins & Fauser, 2005, p. 104). The working hypothesis of the present study is that there exists a close connection between first language (L1) and second language (L2) LC research, although this connection, to our knowledge, has never been investigated systematically. The connection, if extant, would result in reciprocal impacts from L1 and L2 research on the definition and operationalization of LC. By exploring this connection, we aim to shed light on influential research trends, which ­comprise specialized research clusters and their creators/facilitators (i.e., authors and journals). We also investigate L2‐specific research trends to determine the width and breadth of LC research while highlighting the contributions of L2 research to applied linguistics more broadly. The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Overall, our study attempts to answer the following two questions: 1. Where is the LC specialty located among other fields of science and how is it connected with other research specialties? 2. Who/what are the most influential researchers/publications/keywords/research trends? Once we have identified the influential streams of LC research, we provide a summary of the sub‐themes within the five most popular clusters of studies. Thus, our narrative review of trends in the study of LC is grounded in what appear the most notable areas of research.

Co‐citation Analysis Co‐citation analysis (CA) refers to a group of methods that allows for visualization of ­scholarship across different disciplines (Chen, 2016) and a “big data” approach to reviewing the literature. As a group of scholars cite a common set of documents, for instance, those “co‐ citations” indicate articles likely to contain ideas, methods, constructs, theories, and terms that have made some measurable impact on the field (Chen et al., 2010). The specific co‐citation‐ based tools we used in the present study included the dual‐map overlay (DMO), document co‐citation analysis (DCA), author co‐citation analysis (ACA), journal co‐citation analysis (JCA), and keywords analysis, which we briefly review (Chen & Leydesdorff, 2014). LC is not a uniquely linguistic construct, and so as not to bias our review of “trends in LC” these co‐citation tools allow us to explore beyond journals and scholars with which/whom we are familiar and track the evolution of its study across disciplinary divides.

Research Question 1: Dual‐map Overlay Research question 1 asked where LC is located among other fields of science and how it is connected with other research specialties. This question was answered using a visualization tool called the DMO. A DMO is an inter‐domain representation of specialties that, in the present study, provided information about the position of L1 and L2 LC research on the Web of Science (WoS); that is, it represents how the publications we identified (see Table 9.1) have developed among a network comprising papers in 10 000 journals and how other specialties have influenced work in LC (Chen & Leydesdorff, 2014). There were two steps in creating the DMO: (i) creating a global map of science as a base map with all journals indexed in WoS that are grouped and colored thematically (Chen, 2006; Chen, et  al., 2010; Leydesdorff, Carley, & Rafols, 2013); and (ii) laying the set of publications from the Scopus dataset over the base map. The generated map also depicted the trajectories of citation arcs, which act as threads connecting source journals (the citing) to target journals (the cited). In other words, they show what research fields and journals L1 and L2 listening researchers have cited, highlighting the interconnections of listening research as a specialty and the other specialties it is connected to. The strength of citations and concentration of research publications were represented by the thickness of the arcs, and their significance was measured by z statistics.

Research Question 2: Influential Trends Research question 2 asked about the most influential researchers, publications, keywords, and trends. This question was answered by developing separate networks for authors, documents, journals, and keywords, using DCA, ACA, JCA, and keywords analysis. Generating each network comprised three stages (node selection, network development, and visualizing and labeling clusters), which are discussed further.

Linguistics 141

Node Selection

Nodes are the key factors and include authors, documents, journals, and keywords that act as building blocks of networks, with cited articles being the most commonly chosen nodes. CiteSpace software was used in the current study, providing different ways to identify single or multiple nodes to form a network with single or multiple links. According to Chen (2014), the most efficient and recommended method is using the Top N or Top N% most cited items per slice, which was used in the present study. We further used CiteSpace to identify the nodes that connect otherwise discrete clusters and characterize transition from one research front to another. The nodes connecting two clusters are referred to as “pivotal points,” “turning points,” or “tipping points,” and the position of a node in a network is important for identifying such points (Chen, 2004). We measured the quality of the networks using structural and temporal metrics. Three structural metrics were computed: (i) Freeman’s betweenness centrality metric, which quantifies the importance of each node to understand the progress of pathways between the clusters (Freeman, Roeder, & Mulholland, 1979). Nodes with high betweenness centrality tend to be found in paths connecting different clusters and are thus important for binding separate components of the network; (ii) the modularity (Q) index, which measures the extent to which a network can be divided into independent blocks and ranges from 0 to 1, with lower values indicating high homogeneity of the network (Newman, 2006; Shibata, Kajikawa, Takeda, & Matsushima, 2008); and (iii) the average silhouette score (Rousseeuw, 1987), which explains how well a cited object has been classified in or matched with the cluster in which it has been placed, based on its connections with its neighboring nodes. Large silhouette metrics indicate that the clustering algorithm has adopted a strong clustering structure and is able to identify publication clusters. The following temporal metrics were computed: (i) citation “burstness,” which refers to the frequency of citing a reference and indicates milestone publications in the field at specific time points (Chen, Song, Yuan, & Zhang, 2008; Kleinberg, 2003); and (ii) sigma (∑), which ranges from 0 to 1 and is a measure of a publication’s likelihood to represent novel ideas (Chen et al., 2009).

Network Development

We adopted a multiple perspective co‐citation method that facilitates integrating network ­visualization and clustering techniques augmented by automatic cluster labeling and text summarization (Chen et al., 2010). We employed DCA, JCA, and co‐occurring author keywords (DE), and keywords plus (ID), which are useful approaches in co‐citation analysis. While the unit of analysis in DCA is set as publications, the unit of analysis in ACA is authors; their intellectual relationships are reflected through the scientific literature (Small, 1973; Small & Greenlee, 1980; Small, 1977). A specialty narrative is only meaningful when sufficient citation information is attached to the narrative (Small, 1986; White & Griffith, 1981).

Visualizing and Labeling Clusters

CiteSpace provides two layouts for visualizing data: the standard graph view (cluster view) and the time zone view. We used the time zone view because it highlights temporal patterns and makes the specialty easily recognizable. In this method, the left to right view depicts the time zone in terms of years, and the vertical spacing allows overlap of clusters in case of interconnecting pathways. The design of the time zone view resembles the overall layout of time‐line visualization (Morris, Yen, Wu, & Asnake, 2003). (Due to space constraints, we only present the visualized DCA.) The clusters were labeled automatically using key terms selected and ranked from noun phrases and index terms of citing articles by three algorithms, namely ‐tf*idf (Salton & Yang, 1973), log‐likelihood ratio (LLR) tests (Dunning, 1993), and mutual information (MI). According to Chen (2016, 2018), the LLR algorithm provides more useful labels and was thus used in this chapter. These labels were subsequently applied to the clusters in heterogeneous networks of terms and articles. To maximize precision, labels were extracted from the titles of

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publications as well as keywords suggested by authors and key phrases in abstracts. Finally, the major citing publications and bursts in each cluster were closely examined by the authors, and their contents were interpreted and synthesized.

Results Following Chen’s (2017) methodology, we downloaded 2612 publication records (alongside their 94 777 references) after searching for “listening comprehension” in Scopus. Next, the identifying data per publication, including countries, universities, journals/books, abstracts, keywords, references, and authors, were downloaded and input into CiteSpace computer ­software version 5.4 (Chen, 2016) to generate the dual map overlay (see Figure 9.1). CiteSpace was used to carry out a unique, progressive co‐citation networks analysis to detect nodes, develop networks of co‐cited publications, and visualize clusters in multi‐dimensional views, which were then inspected and interpreted by both authors.

Research Question 1: Dual‐map Overlay The DMO network generated in CiteSpace depicts the locus of LC over the multi‐specialty base map and traces the connections between these specialties. As shown in Figure 9.1, various domains or disciplines were closely and/or distantly related to LC, with the labels of disciplines derived from journal titles (Chen, 2018). The left portion of the map represents the citing journals, while the right portion contains cited journals with colored arcs following the trajectory of citations. For instance, the turquoise arcs running from “Psychology, Education, Health” to “Psychology, Education, Social” and “Veterinary, Animal, Parasitology” represent the citation paths of scientific research papers in “Psychology, Education, Health” that are closely linked to papers from “Psychology, Education, Social” and “Veterinary, Animal, Parasitology,” suggesting an interdisciplinary trend. The thickness of the citation arcs represents the strength of connections between the citing and cited papers. While the research papers published in “Psychology, Education, Health” had a pronounced connection with those in “Psychology, Education, Social,” their connection with “Veterinary, Animal, Parasitology” was relatively weaker, indicating that the volume of articles cited by papers in “Psychology, Education, Health” was larger than that in “Psychology, Education, Social.” It can also be noted that papers in LC had weak connections with other disciplines including “Health, Nursing, Medicine,” “History, Philosophy, Records,” and so on.

Research Question 2: Influential Trends Timeline View of Research Clusters

Figure 9.2 presents 14 major clusters at different time points and their connections. The modularity Q and silhouette average indices were 0.8354 and 0.4678, respectively, suggesting network homogeneity and clustering clarity (Rousseeuw, 1987). While the clusters were ­characterized by bursts of citation articles (research fronts represented by red circles), the connections between clusters were primarily characterized by their evolution as intellectual bases, as represented by the golden threads. This evolution of citation networks is further detailed by the purple rings in the network representing the pivotal points (turning points), which are indicative of the progressive path of research within and between clusters. The longest active cluster was identified as cluster 6 (1982–2009), which was automatically labeled as “video media,” and the shortest was cluster 37 (2007–2010), labeled as “reading comprehension skill.” The highest burstness elements were visible from 2005–2010 and 2009–2013 within cluster 9 (English listening comprehension) and cluster 4 (researching

Figure 9.1  The dual‐map overlay of research in listening comprehension. The figure was created using CiteSpace, Version 5.4 (Chen, 2016, 2017).

Figure 9.2  Visual representation of research clusters arranged across time (modularity Q = 0.8354; mean silhouette = 0.4678).

Linguistics 145 listening comprehension). This indicates that the most influential citations constituting the bursts were concentrated between 2005 and 2013, although the corresponding clusters (9  and 4) were relatively short‐lived. CiteSpace arranges the clusters such that the most ­influential ones appear on the top of the list, and the less developed or influential ones at the bottom. In previous research, the content of the main clusters has been submitted to thorough inspections and scrutiny to determine the contribution of the cluster to the specialty (Chen, 2016). In the present study, the influential clusters are #0 through #5 – this is evidenced by the size of the cluster (number of publications) as well as the number of impactful publications with high burstness and/or high centrality and sigma, which is 25 (cluster #0), 11 (cluster #1), 14 (cluster #2), 17 (cluster #3), 16 (cluster #4), and 13 (cluster #5).

Document Citation Analysis

Next, we performed DCA‐based burst detection analysis to identify key publications in the specialty. Table 9.1 presents the burst citations detected from 1982–2019, with the most progressive evolution of the field occurring between 1995 and 2014. We computed the strength of burstness, which identified Vandergrift (2007) as possessing the highest strength (13.391; period: 2009–2014) followed by Hugdahl and Davidson (2004) (strength = 10.4123; period: 2006–2011). There are some nodal points in the network in which more than one publication achieved the same citation burst in the same time period, thereby exhibiting co‐burstness ­patterns. For example, Lepola, Lynch, Laakkonen, Silvén, and Niemi (2012) and Tilstra, McMaster, Van den Broek, Kendeou, and Rapp (2009) were bursts from 2015 to2017 with nearly identical magnitudes of strength (5.7366 and 5.7846, respectively). It took an average of 2.9 years (SD = 1.29 years) for a research article to become influential; however, there were some exceptions (Goh & Taib, 2006; Graham, 2006; Kim & Phillips, 2014) that were recognized within one year and quickly became turning points in the field. There were also cases like Florit, Roch, Altoè, and Levorato (2009) and Tilstra et al. (2009) that took around six years to achieve citation bursts. On average, citation bursts remained active for 4.41 years (SD = 2.05 years), whereas rare and widely influential works, such as Goh and Taib (2006), Graham (2006), and Vandergrift and Tafaghodtari (2010), were active for 6–7 years. Another notable pattern in Table  9.1 is that, among the top 10 references with the highest strengths, research by Vandergrift occupies more than half of the range, particularly from 2009 to 2014. This helped us identify and correlate the locus of works by Vandergrift with the spatial location of bursts within the timeline view, indicating his prominent contributions to LC research. In 2019, Vandergrift was still the most influential author with his works (Vandergrift, & Goh, 2012; Vandergrift & Tafaghodtari, 2010) achieving strength metrics of 9.0023 and 6.7579, respectively.

Journal Co‐citation Analysis

Next, we performed JCA to map the citation bursts of journals publishing influential works in the field. Table 9.2 lists the journals that have existed as “bursts” at different periods, indicating their timeline of activity from 2009 to 2014. As shown, the earliest citation burst in LC research was from the journal, Scientific Studies of Reading, from 2009 to 2019 (strength = 12.9375), while the most recent bursts are from Annals of Dyslexia (strength = 6.5704) and Canadian Modern Language Review from 2017 to2019 (strength = 4.4837). In the case of journals, burstness lasted an average of 4.14 years (SD = 2.20 years). The most influential journals, Reading and Writing (strength = 21.8266) and Language Teaching Research (strength = 17.8407), were active around the same period (2013–2019), indicating a co‐burstness pattern. Finally, the journal, Scientific Studies of Reading, to which the earliest citation burst belongs, was also the longest burst, lasting for 10 years from 2009 to 2019.

Keywords Analysis

Highly used keywords were extracted from publications using the DE and ID methods (see  Table  9.3). The most influential keywords observed over the course of 70 years were

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Table 9.1  Publication bursts.* References

Year

Strength

Begin

End

Culling JF, 1995, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, V98, P785–797

1995

5.5171

1998

2003

Blauert J, 1997, Spatial Hearing: The Psychophysics of Human Sound Localization

1997

6.2194

2001

2004

Cambridge UP, 2001, Book

2001

9.7504

2002

2009

Pollmann S, 2002, Neuropsychology, V16, P56–64

2002

5.1161

2003

2008

Hugdahl K, 2003, The Asymmetrical Brain

2003

10.4123

2006

2011

Vandergrift L, 2003, Language Learning, V53, P463–496

2003

8.4163

2006

2011

Vandergrift L, 2003, Canadian Modern Language Review, V59, P425–440

2003

5.4336

2006

2011

Wilson M, 2003, ELT Journal, V57, P335–343

2003

4.3562

2006

2010

Graham S, 2006, System, V34, P165–182

2006

7.4663

2007

2014

Thomsen T, 2004, Neuroimage, V21, P211–218

2004

5.3676

2007

2009

Goh C, 2006, ELT Journal, V60, P222–232

2006

5.0240

2007

2013

Vandergrift L, 2007, Language Teaching, V40, P191–210

2007

13.3910

2009

2014

Vandergrift L, 2006, Language Learning, V56, P431–462

2006

8.2218

2009

2014

Cambridge UP, 2005, Book

2005

7.6603

2009

2013

Cutting LE, 2006, Scientific Studies of Reading, V10, P277–299

2006

7.1788

2009

2013

Keenan JM, 2008, Scientific Studies of Reading, V12, P281–300

2008

5.2918

2010

2016

Macaro E, 2007, Book.

2007

4.7580

2010

2015

Hugdahl K, 2009, Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, V50, P11–22

2009

4.6518

2011

2016

Graham S, 2008, Language Learning, V58, P747–783

2008

4.6518

2011

2016

Vandergrift L, 2010, Language Learning, V60, P470–497

2010

6.7579

2012

2019

Zen H, 2009, Speech Communication, V51, P1039–1064

2009

4.6491

2012

2017

Kendeou P, 2009, Journal of Educational Psychology, V101, P765–778

2009

4.5903

2012

2017

Bullock BE, 2009, Book. Cambridge UP

2009

4.3155

2012

2017

Goh C, 2008, RELC Journal, V39, P188–213

2008

5.2094

2013

2015

Winke P, 2010, Language Learning & Technology, V14, P65–86

2010

5.0430

2013

2017

Joshi RM, 2012, Journal of Learning Disabilities, V45, P480–486

2012

6.9950

2014

2019

Florit E, 2011, Educational Psychology Review, V23, P553–576

2011

7.5279

2015

2019

Florit E, 2009, British Journal of Developmental Psychology, V27, P935–951

2009

7.2284

2015

2017

Tilstra J, 2009, Journal of Research in Reading, V32, P383–401

2009

5.7846

2015

2017

Lepola J, 2012, Reading Research Quarterly, V47, P259–282

2012

5.7366

2015

2017

Tunmer WE, 2012, Journal of Learning Disabilities, V45, P453–466

2012

5.5070

2015

2019

Kim YS, 2014, Reading Research Quarterly, V49, P269–281

2014

4.3454

2015

2019

Vandergrift L & Goh C, 2012, Book. Routledge.

2012

9.0023

2017

2019

*Only the first author of the above references is listed due to space constraints. For a full citation, please contact the first author of this chapter.

Linguistics 147 Table 9.2  Journal bursts. Cited Journal

Strength

Begin

End

Scientific Studies of Reading

12.9375

2009

2019

Language and Cognitive Processes Computer Assisted Language Learning

7.3455

2009

2015

13.4634

2010

2019

9.2310

2010

2019

System

17.0240

2010

2017

English Language Teaching Journal

12.8281

2010

2017

Language Learning & Technology

13.1343

2011

2017

Annual Review of Applied Linguistics

13.8532

2011

2017

Learning And Individual Differences

8.1176

2012

2019

13.5770

2012

2017

8.5092

2012

2015

10.8296

2012

2015

6.0038

2012

2015

Reading and Writing

21.8266

2013

2019

Language Teaching Research

17.8407

2013

2019

Foreign Language Annals

5.2802

2013

2017

Journal of Memory And Language

5.3158

2013

2015

Educational Psychology Review

15.2503

2014

2019

Journal of Research in Reading

15.1348

2014

2019

Reading in a Foreign Language

8.8156

2014

2016

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

7.1830

2014

2015

Language Testing

The Modern Language Journal Acta Acustica United with Acustica Speech Communication Structural Equation Modeling

4.9055

2014

2015

Psychological Methods

7.19850

2015

2019

Reading Psychology

16.8098

2015

2019

6.7858

2015

2019

British Journal of Psychology

Review of Educational Research

5.0788

2015

2019

10.0898

2015

2019

Remedial and Special Education

9.4600

2015

2019

The Reading Teacher

5.2609

2015

2017

Journal of the Audio Engineering Society

10.7671

2015

2017

Discourse Processes

10.2894

2015

2017

Contemporary Educational Psychology International Journal of Listening

8.1509

2015

2016

PLOS ONE

11.4130

2016

2019

Psychological Science

British Journal of Developmental Psychology

12.3455

2016

2019

Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry

6.8726

2016

2019

British Journal of Educational Psychology

10.7538

2016

2019

8.4369

2016

2019

Language Teaching

16.1686

2016

2019

Annals of Dyslexia

6.5704

2017

2019

Canadian Modern Language Review

4.4837

2017

2019

Language Assessment Quarterly

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Table 9.3  Keyword bursts. Keywords

Strength

Begin

End

Listening comprehension

66.5175

2009

2019

Listening test

61.2142

2010

2019

Subjective listening test

33.5159

2011

2019

Young adult

29.2087

2009

2019

Comprehension

25.9947

2009

2019

Reading comprehension

23.9720

2009

2019

Speech intelligibility

21.8849

2012

2019

Audition

14.8600

2012

2019

Speech enhancement

11.8903

2010

2019

Signal‐to‐noise ratio

7.3996

2010

2019

EFL (English as a Foreign Language)

6.2345

2012

2019

Reverberation

10.4918

2012

2017

Acoustics

9.1073

2012

2017

Perception

18.0471

2010

2016

7.0821

2012

2016

Acoustic stimulation

17.8262

2004

2015

Physiology

12.1545

2009

2015

Auditory stimulation

9.1571

2010

2015

Cue

6.2008

2005

2014

Signal processing

5.8419

2000

2014

Sound detection

6.3624

2009

2013

Fundamental frequency

5.7072

2012

2013

Comparative study

4.6093

2012

2013

Time factor

4.8194

2010

2012

Speech quality

4.7661

2011

2012

Hidden Markov model

Pure tone audiometry

4.5533

2011

2012

21.0378

1996

2011

Left hemisphere

9.3877

2005

2011

Auditory discrimination

8.0788

1998

2011

Perceptive discrimination

6.6144

2010

2011

Sex difference

6.3604

2008

2011

Stimulus response

4.9551

2005

2011

Right hemisphere

4.9551

2005

2011

10.2498

1996

2010

4.9978

2009

2010

15.3952

2004

2009

5.3369

2003

2009

Functional laterality

Middle aged Preschool child Analysis of variance Reaction time Language test

4.6711

2007

2009

Controlled study

19.2003

1998

2008

Reference value

11.8636

1993

2008

Linguistics 149 Table 9.3  (Continued) Keywords

Strength

Begin

End

Clinical article

8.4371

1986

2008

Vowel

7.6537

2003

2008

Ear

5.9579

2006

2008

Discrimination (psychology)

4.9445

2007

2008

Algorithm

4.5734

2005

2008

11.5053

1998

2007

Mathematical model

9.3682

2005

2007

Correlation analysis

5.8190

2003

2007

Binaural hearing

Task performance

15.6512

1994

2006

Noise

9.1037

2000

2006

Brain asymmetry

4.8505

1994

2006

Perceptual masking

4.7233

2001

2006

Word recognition

4.4770

1994

2006

Acoustic wave

6.1127

2001

2005

Auditory masking

5.7487

1990

2005

Normal human

5.6089

1989

2005

Sound spectrography

13.8637

1999

2003

Sound localization

8.1360

1990

2003

Conference paper

5.8943

1993

2003

Frequency

4.8807

2001

2003

Pitch discrimination

4.7678

2002

2003

Speech acoustics

4.6979

1994

2003

Speech coding

4.8550

1999

2002

Pitch perception

7.3728

1991

2000

Dyslexia

4.3001

1990

2000

Cerebral cortex

6.5619

1982

1999

Mental recall

8.5666

1983

1998

Psychophysics

6.8624

1992

1997

Attention

19.3149

1989

1996

Brain

7.2085

1992

1995

Arousal

5.4468

1989

1995

Handedness

4.8250

1994

1995

Laterality

30.7704

1976

1994

Loudness perception

11.7258

1989

1994

Auditory threshold Psychoacoustics Signal detection

8.1683

1990

1993

13.2878

1990

1992

5.4204

1990

1992

Hearing test

14.3111

1979

1991

Hemisphere

7.5842

1983

1991 (Continued)

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Table 9.3  (Continued) Keywords

Strength

Begin

End

Semantics

4.6851

1983

1991

23.2274

1982

1990

Case report

7.9754

1981

1989

Brain cortex

4.5770

1982

1989

Psychological aspect

Computer analysis

4.3546

1986

1989

Central nervous system

44.0579

1979

1987

Auditory system

26.8522

1979

1987

Diagnosis

18.6438

1979

1987

Memory

5.6210

1972

1987

Etiology

4.7186

1983

1987

Aphasia

7.3294

1980

1986

Brain mapping

5.2866

1979

1986

Hemispheric dominance

12.5455

1972

1984

Speech perception

6.6455

1979

1984

Major clinical study

6.5676

1977

1982

Human cell

9.3036

1979

1981

Auditory perception

7.7306

1970

1981

Hearing

6.5011

1965

1980

“listening comprehension” (strength = 66.5175; period = 2009–2019) followed by “listening test” (strength = 61.2142; period = 2010–2019) and “subjective listening test” (strength = 33.5159; period = 2011–2019). Earlier keyword bursts, such as “hearing,” “auditory perception,” “human cell,” “major clinical study,” and “speech perception” seem to be more congruent with the biological dimensions of listening and hearing.

Discussion Our study adopted a scientometric approach to examine and synthesize 70 years of LC research. Previous narrative reviews, in our view, have been focused only on specific aspects of LC that were deemed important by researchers (Aryadoust, 2017; Berne, 2004; Brown, 2017; Vandergrift, 2007). The application of co‐citation methods in the present study allowed us to identify both inter‐ and intra‐specialty trends in L1 and L2 research. Overall, the analyses revealed an interconnection between L1 and L2 research (based on the modularity Q index and silhouette metric), supporting the working hypothesis of the study. Despite this connection, we have found evidence demonstrating the independence of the two conspicuous L2 research trends, as will be discussed.

Research Question 1 To answer our first research question, we located the LC specialty among other scientific specialties using the DMO, showing previously unknown interdisciplinary relationships ­ ­between LC and other research fields. We found significant links among published research in

Linguistics 151 Metacognition

Decoding skills Simple view of reading

External and internal factors Domains of listening research Dichotic listening

L2 listening assessment

Vocabulary knowledge

Listening comprehension ability

Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire

Internal factors

Memory

External (non-cognitive) factors

Instruction

Neural processes & brain regions

Age

Primary auditory cortex

Voice-onset-time vs right ear advantage

Prefrontal cortex

Age

Difference across schizophrenic, depressed & healthy

Posterior splenium

Gender

Spina bifida meningomyelocele

Attention

Visual and audio elements

Right auditory cortex

motivation Topical knowledge Self-determination theory Noticing

Effect of visuals

Bilateral auditory cortices Left non-primary auditory cortex Subcortical routes

Directional categorization of frequencymodulated tones Unconscious processing of emotions

Figure 9.3  Visual summary of the research foci and scope of the top five clusters. The diagram was generated using the AMOS computer package (Arbuckle, 2014).

“Psychology, Education, Social” and other fields such as “Veterinary, Animal, Parasitology,” “Psychology, Education, Health,” “Health, Nursing, Medicine,” and “History, Philosophy, Records.” The breadth of this research testifies to the importance of LC and its multidimensionality across scientific specialties and, in our view, supports that listening is less likely a “Cinderella skill” anymore.

Research Question 2 To answer the second research question, we generated several networks. Figure 9.3 provided a visual synopsis of the main findings of the content analysis of the top five clusters. The first analysis, DCA, identified 14 major research clusters. Of these, cluster #0 and cluster #2 highlighted the interdependence of reading and listening research, with the former cluster underscoring the impact of LC on reading and the latter cluster showing the effect of reading on listening. In contrast to the commonly held notion of the unidirectional effect of reading research on listening research, our findings support an emerging bidirectional association (see also Lahman, this volume). Specific neural processes and attentional pathways in dichotic listening tasks, including the prefrontal cortex, posterior splenium, bilateral auditory cortices, left non‐primary auditory cortex, and subcortical routes, were also detected (see also Teubner‐Rhodes & Kuchinsky, this volume). The effect of various internal and external factors on LC, such as metacognition, memory, vocabulary knowledge, gender, and age, were underscored in cluster #4. Finally, research trends in L2 listening assessment and measurement were identified in cluster #5, ­suggesting their emerging influence on the field.

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We suggest that these research trends should be extended by adopting inter‐specialty investigations using multidisciplinary methods. For example, while there are some inter‐cluster connections between clusters #0, #1, #2, #4, #5, #6, #9, and #13 (see Figure 9.2), the remaining clusters show minimal or no links. One useful approach for further research would be to revisit the bursts or citing papers with an inter‐cluster presence (Vandergrift, Goh, Mareschal, & Tafaghodtari, 2006; Vandergrift & Tafaghodtari, 2010; Goh & Taib, 2006), and combine the techniques they employed with less commonly used methods like brain imaging to link behavioral, educational, and neural dimensions of LC in first and second language learning and assessment (Aryadoust, 2017). In addition, the fact that most recent journal bursts in LC pertain to language learning and assessment suggests an emphasis on this specialty. We suggest that further emphasis should be placed on cross‐disciplinary research to investigate lesser‐ known dimensions of LC in learning and assessment (Aryadoust, 2017). DCA and ACA further revealed that some bursts rapidly attracted research attention (e.g., Goh & Taib, 2006; Graham, 2006; Kim & Phillips, 2014) within one year, whereas others took more time (e.g., Florit et al., 2009; Tilstra et al., 2009). The lifetime of a cluster can be interpreted in more than one way. For example, a short life could be viewed as a potential area for further research and development or as representative of insufficient resources in the cluster. The reality will be determined by whether short‐lived clusters attract attention from future researchers or remain dormant. Finally, the top five impactful clusters (#1–#5) would need to be examined more closely in future research. Due to the focus of the current study and space constraints, we provide a discussion of the two impactful clusters that focus on L2 LC research (#4 and #5).

Cluster #4: Researching (L2) Listening Comprehension

LC refers not only to the understanding of literal messages, but also a listener’s ability to interpret the meaning implied by applying pragmatic and world knowledge. An awareness of this process is fundamental to the understanding of the construct of LC (Vandergrift, 2015). Publications in cluster #4 discuss the trend of L2 work over the past few years, stressing the role of communication‐ and metacognition‐oriented approaches to listening. They also encompass the various theories behind conversational listening and the empirical evidence for the models that served as the foundation for linguistic‐based listening theories (Baleghizadeh & Rahimi, 2011; Flavell, 1979; Metcalfe & Shimamura, 1994; Vandergrift, 2005). Recent studies in cluster #4 have drawn attention towards evidence‐based approaches to teaching L2 listening (Flowerdew & Miller, 2005; Macaro, Graham, & Vanderplank, 2007; Lynch, 1998; Vandergrift, 2004). The inception of this cluster could be viewed as publications that emphasize Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) that foregrounds the importance of practicing core listening skills for communicative purposes (Brown, 1987; Brown, 2006; Goh, 2008). CLT emphasizes the role of communicative competence and interactions in L2 learning and, therefore, designates a central role to LC in L2 development (Brown, 2006). In addition, for listening skills to develop in unison with other skills, they should be taught synergistically with other language skills, such as speaking (oral communication), but also teachers should be aware of the significance of integrating listening with speaking. This cluster also emphasizes the learner‐oriented approach to L2 learning (Goh, 2008; Vandergrift, 2004, 2007), highlighting the role of metacognition or the ability to think about thinking (Flavell, 1979; Metcalfe & Shimamura, 1994) in listening (Chamot, 1995; Mendelsohn, 1998; Vandergrift, 2004). Different definitions for metacognition emerge from this cluster. For example, Anderson (2002) proposed a five‐stage interactive process that includes planning, selecting and using learning strategies, monitoring strategy use, orchestrating various strategies, and evaluating the strategies used for better learning. In another publication, Vandergrift and Goh (2012) built on their previos work to propose a multidimensional framework for metacognition comprising problem‐solving, planning and evaluation, mental translation, person

Linguistics 153 knowledge, and directed attention. These five dimensions were originally identified by Vandergrift et al. (2006), who developed the Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire (MALQ). The MALQ was developed based on two essential features of metacognition, namely self‐ appraisal and self‐management. The paper by Vandergrift et  al. (2006) is a key publication (burst) in this cluster which uses self‐report and advanced quantitative methods to operationalize and measure metacognition. There are myriad other methods reported in the literature to identify and/or measure metacognitive strategies including classroom‐based research, oral reports, and written notes (Chamot, 2005). Metacognition can help L2 learners control their thoughts and regulate their own learning. Specifically, the reiterative listening tasks that guide students through listening processes by engaging them in the use of prediction, monitoring, evaluating, and problem solving can help them develop metacognitive knowledge, critical for the development of self‐regulated listening (Chamot & El‐Dinary, 1999; Vandergrift, 2002, 2003b). A substantive amount of evidence from this cluster demonstrates that metacognition can directly affect learning processes and outcomes (Boekaerts, Pintrich, & Zeidner, 2000; Bolitho et al., 2003; Eilam & Aharon, 2003; Goh, 2000; Mokhtari & Reichard, 2002; Palmer & Goetz, 1988; Schoonen, Hulstijn, & Bossers, 1998; Victori & Lockhart, 1995; Winne, 1995; Zimmerman & Schunk, 2001). Metacognition has also been shown to positively correlate with increased motivation, self‐efficacy, and knowledge of learning strategies along with some evidence of self‐determination continuum in response patterns and the assessment of listening (Baleghizadeh & Rahimi, 2011; Goh & Hu, 2014; Liu, 2008). It has been argued that the metacognitive approach to listening helps develop strategies to control listening processes and develop phonological awareness and relevant perception skills (Goh & Hu, 2014; Vandergrift & Goh, 2012). Graham and Macaro (2008), who consider listening a three‐stage process (perceptual processing, parsing, and utilization), have shown that the functionality of metacognitive strategies in learning situations depends on learners’ proficiency level. These authors argued that the design of listening instruction should not necessarily be modeled with the assumption of successful or high proficiency listeners because listeners do not attain success in listening using a set of strategies. Rather, based on a listener’s linguistic knowledge, the listener can use particular strategies they have at their disposal. Other studies have also shown that strategies have a positive impact on listening performance, which is, in turn, linked closely to changes in self‐efficacy, and that strategy instruction has the greatest impact on students’ confidence in understanding “details” and “opinions” in oral communications (Graham & Macaro, 2008; Graham, Santos, & Vanderplank, 2008, 2011). A related advancement in the field includes empirical research on L2 listeners’ awareness of the listening process (Vandergrift, 2007). Examining the strategies of L2 learners could provide insights into their metacognitive, cognitive, social, and affective processes involved in language learning (Chamot, 2005; Coşkun, 2010; Cross, 2010; Vandergrift & Tafaghodtari, 2010). In this context, Vandergrift & Goh (2012) have proposed a pedagogical metacognitive sequence model along with a task‐based learning framework to scaffold L2 listening. While the former integrates all dimensions of listening using perception activities, authentic listening tasks, and extensive and interactive listening activities, the latter enables learners to practice listening for communication and meaning‐making and at the same time aims to develop their metacognitive awareness about L2 listening. This cycle enhances both top‐down and bottom‐ up dimensions of listening as well as metacognitive awareness of the learner (Richards, 2008; Vandergrift, & Goh, 2012; Yeldham & Gruba, 2016). Finally, there has been an emphasis on the need for balancing the various dimensions of learning including the changes in learners’ behavior, internal learning processes, strategy‐ specific changes in the learners’ approach to foreign language learning study and general changes in attitudes towards language learning (Chen, 2007). In sum, cluster #4 uncovers the need to understand specific effects of instruction and metacognition in improving L2 LC skills

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and in long‐term listening development. Moreover, the findings could lead to the designing of rigorous intervention studies that could help integrate learning strategies into classroom instructions.

Cluster #5: Listening Questionnaires

Cluster #5 is related to cluster #4 but further stresses the role of pedagogical methods and instruments and metacognition (particularly the pre‐MALQ period) in the development of LC. For successful listening pedagogy, it is important to consider the psychological nature of language acquisition process, the relative position and role of input and interaction, and ­listeners’ views of their own capacity to acquire the language (Rost, 2002). Over a long period in the history of LC research, however, the focus was more inclined towards the product of listening and very little on the process itself. In recent years, the focus has shifted towards understanding the inner aspects of listening and their implications for L2 listening (Vandergrift, 2004). A number of studies have shown that students taught to become aware of the various aspects of second language listening including their own role and performance as L2 listeners, the demands and procedures of L2, and the strategies for listening, are well placed to become autonomous learners (Field, 1998; Goh, 1997). The instructional instruments that engage students in prediction, evaluation, and other processes involved in listening that aid in reflection on the listening process help students develop metacognitive knowledge and achieve better L2 listening skills (Vandergrift, 2002, 2003a). Cluster #5 encompasses various instructional techniques in raising L2 learners’ metacognitive awareness of listening, the cognitive processes involved in listening, and some alternative approaches to listening instruction. The evolution of LC pedagogy has been traced from a “listening to repeat” approach of the audio‐lingual period, to the “question–answer” comprehension approach, parallel to the development of strategy‐based metacognitive approach (Vandergrift, 2004; see Rost, this volume). It has been discovered, however, that the use of strategies is not unique to L2 but also used by L1 listeners for self‐regulation of listening (Macaro, 2006). Relatedly, two major approaches to listening pedagogy are highlighted in this cluster, namely the top‐down and bottom‐up processes as well as models with integrated approaches. While the top‐down approach raises metacognitive awareness about listening, the latter develops lexical segmentation and word recognition skills in the listener (Graham, 2006; Vandergrift, 2004, 2011). In addition, listening activities can be greatly improved with task design principles such as selective inputs to increase learners’ motivation, clear designs that focus on meaning, active listening strategies such as consciousness raising, guided and ­structured practice of the new strategies, and building in activities to enhance language awareness (Rost, 2002; Wilson, 2003). This body of knowledge has led to various approaches to improve listening skills in less successful L2 listeners, and an understanding of these protocols in listeners of different language proficiency levels is crucial for developing effective L2 listening instruction (Goh & Taib, 2006; Vandergrift, 1998). For instance, cluster #5 reveals that the speed and effectiveness at which listeners carry out certain processes depends on the degree to which they can efficiently process the text heard (Vandergrift, 2004). It has been shown that while native language users listen with little consciousness and attention to individual words, beginner L2 listeners are limited by cognitive constraints and conscious focus on the details of what they hear (Vandergrift, 2004). A number of articles from this cluster have discovered differences in strategical processing of L2 listeners. While less successful listeners rely primarily on decoding the surface features of a language, successful listeners dynamically interact with the text, by using metacognitive strategies such as predicting, interpreting, and monitoring new linguistic input (Vandergrift, 1998; Vandergrift, 2003b). Less skilled listeners’ failure to provide directions to listening processes results in sparse and disjoint summarization of the passage they heard (Graham, 2003; Vandergrift, 2003b). Goh (2000), in her analysis of listening problems based

Linguistics 155 on the three‐phase model of language comprehension proposed by Andersen (1995), has also identified problems at the perception, parsing, and utilization phases of cognitive processing.

Implications of Clusters #4 and #5 for L2 Listening Research

Several perspectives arise from our review of clusters #4 and #5. First, we identified the communicative approach to teaching L2 listening as a useful method. This approach is characterized by at least two distinctive features. One is that the main goal of language learning and teaching should be to enhance L2 learners’ communicative competence (Brown, 2006; Goh, 2008), which consists of multiple dimensions including vocabulary and lexical competence, strategic competence, and pragmatic competence (Canale & Swain, 1980). Accordingly, the centrality of oral interactions (listening–speaking) should be stressed in L2 teaching classes (Goh & Burns, 2012), meaning that L2 listening should be integrated with speaking (or other language skills) in L2 programs for optimal outcomes. In addition to focusing on fundamental bottom‐up and top‐down processes, the CLT‐based approach to listening necessitates the explicit teaching of other important listening subskills such as backchanneling ability (listeners’ interjection of quick responses to speakers); identify key (manner and tone of speech), register, or instrumentalities (Hymes, 1972) – which, in our view, are under‐appreciated in L2 pedagogy; and strategies to prevent communication breakdowns such as listeners’ mental translation (Vandergrift & Goh, 2012), request for repetition or clarification, and speakers’ attempt to respond to listeners’ requirements (Field, 1998). Using the economic ­metaphor used by Hymes (1989, p. 447), we argue these subskills, which are beyond interlocutors’ lexico‐grammatical competencies, facilitate the implicitly agreed‐upon “division of labor” between listeners and speakers in interactions and should, therefore, be included in L2 listening syllabi. The second feature of the CLT‐based approach to listening is emphasis over the use of authentic listening materials. Despite the fact that authenticity has received a great amount of attention in L2 research (Gilmore, 2007), it is quite under‐appreciated and under‐researched in L2 listening studies (Emerick, 2019). Gilmore (2007, p. 98) identified multiple definitions for authenticity (e.g., “the language produced by native speakers for native speakers” and “the qualities bestowed on a text by the receiver, in that it is not seen as something inherent in a text itself, but is imparted on it by the reader/listener”), stressing the complexity of delineating this concept in L2 teaching and learning fields. In LC research, the perspective is gloomier. Recently, Emerick (2019) stressed the dearth of research in this field and proposed that a multi‐pronged approach to listening, comprising socio‐cultural and linguistic dimensions, should be considered by L2 teachers and researchers. However, there is little research on how and whether L2 listeners would benefit from this approach. Clusters #4 and #5 also have implications for research on the measurement of different dimensions of L2 listening. Unlike L1 research that has mainly targeted young learners to identify learners with special needs, L2 listening research is widely concerned with adult learners. L2 researchers adopting quantitative methods have mainly aimed to develop and/or validate instruments to measure listening skills (Vandergrift & Tafaghodtari, 2010) and ­strategic competence (Graham, 2003; Vandergrift et al., 2006) for adults. The majority of the studies in clusters #4 and #5 emphasize that L2 listening can be defined and measured as a combination of literal and inferential decoding alongside a variety of cognitive and metacognitive strategies (Goh & Hu, 2014; Graham, 2003). There remain gaps, however, in our understanding about skills or processes that measurement instruments and test items measure. On the one hand, advanced methods such as structural equation modeling used by, for example, Vandergrift et al. (2006), shed light on the underlying structure of the measurement instruments used, but, on the other, they are not suitable to detect the actual cognitive mechanisms by which listeners perform on listening tests or the correspondence between these processes under test and non‐test conditions (i.e., authenticity of assessments). Using qualitative methods such as think‐aloud protocols has been proposed (Goh & Taib, 2006) along with the application of neuroimaging methods such as functional near‐infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS)

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to measure listeners’ brain activities and correlate them with test performance to identify neurocognitive processes underlying listening assessments.

Keywords Analysis

Turning to the keywords analysis, if we try to interpret the evolution of keywords from 1965 onwards (central nervous system, auditory system, diagnosis, etc.), we note that for a couple of decades the major keywords in associated publications were more relevant to medicine and health, which is indicative of the efforts of scientists to unpin the biological mechanisms of listening. From the 1980s onwards, a gradual shift in the trend can be observed towards the neurocognition of speech and listening, as supported by keywords like “brain mapping,” “computer analysis,” “sound localization,” and “brain asymmetry.” In recent years, the trends have been towards practical applicability and an analytical approach to LC research, represented by keywords such as “preschool child,” “speech enhancement,” “speech quality,” “hidden Markov model,” “algorithm,” and “mathematical model.” Of note, this list of ­keyword bursts incorporates all domains that have citing connections with LC over 70 years, as shown on the dual‐overlay map (Figure  9.1). For instance, the keywords “diagnosis,” “central nervous system,” “case report,” “normal human,” “physiology,” and so on might be anticipated to be associated with the connections of LC with the domain “Health, Nursing, Medicine” or “Dermatology, Dentistry, Surgery.” Another example is that the keywords “­psychophysics,” “psychoacoustics,” “dyslexia,” “auditory stimulation,” and the like can be associated with the domain “Sports, Rehabilitation, Sport.”

Conclusion The present study has highlighted past and present research trends in LC, taking a closer look at L2 listening research. Of course, the analysis was not confined to any specific field of study, such as first or second language listening, which resulted in providing both a bird’s eye view and an in‐depth inspection of the specialty. Due to space constraints, it was not feasible to review all 14 major clusters, but we believe the synthesis of the top 5 clusters on L2 listening represents the major influential trends in LC1. L2 listening research – specifically instruction, metacognition, and construct definition – has turned into a thriving sub‐specialty in listening research, which is anticipated to exert an impact on L1 listening research in the near future.

Acknowledgment This study was supported by a research grant (RI 2/16 VSA) provided to Vahid Aryadoust from the National Institute of Education of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

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Interested readers can contact the authors to request a list of publications pertinent to other clusters.

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Management and Leadership Sarit Pery, Guy Doytch, and Avraham N. Kluger

Listening is associated with many organizational behaviors known to affect the organization’s bottom line. In this chapter, we focus on four main areas. First, we examine listening and ­organizational outcomes, including organization and employee performance, work‐related attitudes, burnout, and leadership. Next, we explore the meaning of “good listening” in the workplace. We then review several organizational barriers to good listening. The final section focuses on the proper level of analysis (the organization, team, individual, and dyads) when conducting listening research in the workplace.

Listening and Organizational Outcomes Mainstream research in organizational behavior has paid very little attention to listening, and when attention was given to listening, listening was not the main focus of the article (e.g., Korsgaard, Schweiger, & Sapienza, 1995; Tangirala & Ramanujam, 2012). Therefore, in the  following section, we offer a review that illustrates the importance of listening to ­organizational outcomes. In our review, we considered publications from any sub‐discipline (e.g., social psychology, nursing, marketing, etc.) that shed light on the role of listening in organizations.

Listening and Performance Several markers of organizational performance have been linked to listening, including objective measures of performance like sales volume, and more subjective markers like ­customer satisfaction. These outcomes of listening are linked directly or indirectly to the performance of organizations.

Individual and Organizational Markers of Performance

Typical research on listening and performance reports correlations between perceptions of listening and objective measures of employee or organizational performance. At the individual level, research with employees across a range of organization types shows clear advantage for The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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individuals perceived as, or who behave in ways, consistent with an effective listener. In a study among financial advisors, for instance, customers were asked to rate the listening effectiveness of their advisor along with markers of satisfaction, trust, and intentions to purchase financial products (Bergeron & Laroche, 2009). Customers who rated their financial advisor higher in effective listening behaviors were also more likely to express higher trust, satisfaction, and likelihood of purchasing products as well as lower perception of risk. In addition, customer perceptions of listening were positively associated with salesperson‐reported performance, and more important, with the quantitative sales information provided by the financial institution (Bergeron & Laroche, 2009). This listening–sales link was corroborated by a meta‐analysis of 16 different studies (Itani, Goad, & Jaramillo, 2019). Specifically, Itani and his colleagues (2019) estimate that the average correlation between listening and volume of sales is r = 0.38, and when corrected for unreliability, it is ρ = 0.47. Nevertheless, all of the studies reporting correlations between listening and sales performance were based on sales’ person self‐reported performance, with the exception of Bergeron and Laroche (2009), who did not provide details about the nature of the quantitative sales measure. Thus, although it appears that listening is related to objective measure of sale performance, more studies are needed to substantiate the link between listening and objective measure of performance in the domains of sales. Whereas the listening–objective performance link in the domain of sales is suggestive, in other domains the results are more veridical. Levinson, Roter, Mullooly, Dull, and Frankel (1997) examined the relationship between physician communication behaviors and history of lawsuits, that is “no‐claims” versus “claims” (2+ lifetime claims) status. Using audiotapes of 10 routine office visits per physician, N = 124, they coded the physician’s use of facilitating listening using the Roter Interaction Analysis System (e.g., asking patient’s opinion, paraphrasing). Primary care physicians with no claims spent just over three minutes longer per visit, on average, than physicians with claims against them. They also tended to use more facilitation; patients of no‐claims primary care physicians also tended to disclose more about therapy. Other work found that the perception of the organizational listening environment – how employees in the organization feel others in that organization listen and pay attention to them – is positively correlated with the change in net income of that organization (Johnston & Reed, 2017). In the healthcare context, Gonzalez (2009) reported that patient’s physical restraining decreased by 26% after nurses completed a listening training program, suggesting that organizational culture can be shifted by training employees in listening.1 Indeed, listening training in different formats, styles, durations, and foci all have the potential to improve organizational outcomes (see Brownell, this volume). Collectively, these works show that listening is a trainable skill, providing evidence that organizations with large or small budgets could improve not only the listening skills of their employees, but also their bottom line.

Creativity

A unique aspect of performance in organizations is creativity. While creativity may be challenging to define, it is associated with the generation of new and useful ideas (Anderson, Potočnik, & Zhou, 2014). Creativity has become a competitive advantage for organizations and a key factor of an organization’s long‐term survival, performance, and success (Anderson et  al., 2014). In a series of correlational and experimental studies, Castro, Anseel, Kluger, Lloyd, & Turjeman‐Levi (2018) demonstrated a link between listening and creativity. In one experiment, students were asked to produce slogans for a new product. The students described their ideas to listeners for 10 minutes. The listeners were randomly assigned either to a high‐quality listening (no manipulation) or to a low‐quality listening condition (the listener saw flickering, and thus distracting, computer screens behind the speaker). The results showed that students While the author concluded that the effect is not significant, considering the low statistical power and a recalculation of the reported frequencies suggests otherwise.

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produced more slogans when they received high quality listening. Importantly, the benefit of listening was observed on all the creativity measures used in that study (e.g., fluency, originality, flexibility). Listening appears to affect creativity both directly and indirectly through the mediation of psychological safety. For example, to complement their laboratory experiments, Castro et  al. (2018), tested the listening–creativity link using a correlation design in Israeli corporate management units of a healthcare provider. They found that subordinates’ ratings of their supervisor’s listening were correlated with subordinates’ ratings of their own psychological safety, which in turn was correlated with the supervisor’s assessment of subordinate creativity. This suggests that the benefits of listening for creativity are mediated by the ability of the supervisor to listen in a manner that makes the subordinate feel psychologically safe.2 Moreover, this example provides further evidence that good listening can benefit the organization’s performance and success.

Organizational Citizenship Behavior

Organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) is defined as performing work tasks that are beyond the official job requirement, such as helping a colleague, improving work procedures, and making suggestions (Smith, Organ, & Near, 1983). To make their team’s work more effective, managers should encourage policies or psychological processes that increase OCB, including listening. Several studies have found, for instance, that employee perceptions of how well their supervisors listen to them is positively correlated to employee OCB (e.g., Lloyd, Boer, Keller, & Voelpel, 2014), even after controlling for the effects of potential extraneous variables (Schroeder, 2016). These findings suggest that good listening could be an effective way to increase OCB, a known predictor of organizational success.

Summary

Good listeners at work contribute to organizational performance directly and indirectly. Good listeners were found to be good performers  –  their listening contributes to their own performance directly. In addition, managers who listen to their employees contribute to performance indirectly as they increase the creativity of their subordinates, as well as their willingness to perform tasks that are beyond the call of duty. Moreover, managers and co‐workers who listen well contribute to a listening environment that is associated with improved performance of the entire team/unit.

Listening and Work Attitudes Research in organizational behavior includes various measures of job attitudes, such as job ­satisfaction and commitment (Bosco, Uggerslev, & Steel, 2017). The interest of organizations in these attitudes is based on findings that show that these attitudes predict many desirable organizational outcomes, including reduced turnover, tardiness, and absenteeism. All studies linking listening with job attitudes show positive correlations, and some were even studies in controlled experiments suggesting that listening causes more adaptive attitudes.

Job Satisfaction

Employees who are satisfied with their work tend to perform better, are less likely to quit and report higher commitment and job engagement (Judge, Thoresen, Bono, & Patton, 2001; Rich, Lepine, & Crawford, 2010; Saks, 2006; Tett & Meyer, 1993). Given the importance of However, in this field study there was no simple correlation between listening and creativity. The authors conducted a meta‐analysis of all their studies. Results of the meta‐analysis found that across the studies, the listening–creativity link is significant.

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job satisfaction, thousands of studies have focused on its antecedents. Among the antecedents of job satisfaction are pay (Judge, Piccolo, Podsakoff, Shaw, & Rich, 2010), and job characteristics, such as skill variety afforded by the job (Glisson & Durick, 1988), and the complexity of the job (Ganzach, 2003). Less known, however, are findings linking job satisfaction with employee perception of their supervisor’s listening (e.g., Brownell, 1990; Falcione, Daly, & McCroskey, 1977; Tellis‐Nayak, 2007). Interestingly, the relationship between listening and job satisfaction (r = 0.66; Tellis‐Nayak, 2007) seems much larger than that between job satisfaction and either pay (r = 0.15; Judge et al., 2010), or job complexity (r = 0.22; Ganzach, 2003). The difference in the magnitude of these correlations could partly, but not completely, stem from methodological artifacts. Specifically, the low correlation between pay (job complexity) and job satisfaction can be a function of measurement: pay is an objective measure, unlike perceived listening. When both predictor (perceived listening) and criterion (job satisfaction) are self‐reported by the same person, a high correlation could be a function of method bias (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Lee, & Podsakoff, 2003). That is, happy employees may both perceive their manager to listen well and report high job satisfaction, while in fact job satisfaction is not related to listening (i.e., when listening is assessed with coded recordings of subordinate–supervisor interactions). However, the fact that experiments of listening show strong effects on outcomes such as psychological safety (e.g., Castro et al., 2018; Itzchakov, Kluger, & Castro, 2017), it is unlikely that the entire difference between the predictive power of listening and the predictive power of pay can be attributed solely to source bias. Thus, it appears that listening may contribute to job satisfaction more than pay. Organizations and business schools appear to be unaware of this finding, instead investing more money and thought on pay than on teaching managers to listen (Brink & Costigan, 2014).

Commitment

Another benefit of good listening for organizations is related to commitment. Organizational commitment – the psychological bond between employee and organization – is based on a variety of factors including emotional attachment to the organization, feeling of obligation to remain in the organization, and costs of leaving the organization (Choi, Oh, & Colbert, 2015). Because commitment is linked to a variety of organizational‐relevant measures including job performance, organizational citizenship behavior, stress, and turnover (Meyer, Stanley, Herscovitch, & Topolnytsky, 2002), many organizations see high commitment as a central factor of their human management strategy. Because of its consequences, organizations and researchers have invested significant effort into revealing the antecedents of high commitment employees. Listening can be an effective tool to increase commitment. For instance, Reed, Goolsby, and Johnston (2014) studied the link between job commitment and listening at three locations of a high‐performing plastic injection molding manufacturing company. They found the team listening environment, or the extent to which employees feel listened to by team members, to be positively associated with organizational identification and job commitment. This correlational finding is strengthened when we consider similar results from experimental work. For instance, Korsgaard et al. (1995) recruited 20 management teams from a Fortune 500 company. Based on case analysis, each team was asked to make recommendations for the managers of the company. The team’s leader (the real leader at their work) had the responsibility for the team’s final decision. At the beginning, each member developed their recommendation alone and then presented them to the group. After the presentations of all the members, the leader ­separated from the group and made the final decision alone. Then, the leader communicated this decision to the team. The researchers manipulated leader consideration. Leaders in high consideration conditions were instructed to present behaviors representing active listening (e.g., rephrasing statements, asking clarifying questions), while leaders in the low consideration



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condition were required to listen without any comment or acknowledgment of members’ input. Results indicated that members who participated in the high consideration condition showed increased levels of commitment to the leader’s decision compared to the members who participated in the low consideration condition. Thus, good listening can enhance commitment to leaders’ decisions in teams.

Attitude Complexity (Towards One’s Manager)

In addition to fostering job satisfaction and commitment, listening is also an effective way to change someone’s attitudes and to make speakers aware of their shortcomings. As noted earlier, when speakers feel that they have been heard, their psychological safety increases. Individuals who feel “safer” are more likely to consciously consider self‐threating content (Itzchakov & Kluger, 2018; Itzchakov et al., 2017). Consider an employee who made several mistakes in his job and is summoned to a conversation with his manager. The manager can handle this event by explaining to the employee his mistakes and how to avoid repeating them. Yet, telling in the form of feedback often backfires resulting in performance decline (Kluger & DeNisi, 1996). Feedback can increase defensiveness, increasing the chances that the subordinate will try to defend and explain his actions instead of paying attention to inner voices that can increase awareness to self‐threating contents – the wrong behavior. In contrast, if the manager engages in good listening with the employee, it may allow self‐threatening content in the employee’s mind to emerge. When this happens, the employee may realize alone what went wrong. The effect of listening on raising speaker awareness of conflicting cognitions has been demonstrated in both laboratory and organizational settings. For instance, a series of studies by Itzchakov et al. (2017) revealed that when matched with a good listener, speakers were inclined to see more complexity in the subject and were clearer in their understanding of the topic (see also Itzchakov, DeMarree, Kluger, & Turjeman‐Levi, 2018). Moreover, these speakers showed lower levels of extremism in their views. When matched with a poor listener, however, speakers were inclined to choose a clear side and have an extreme point of view. Itzchakov et al. (2017) concluded that the speaker’s perception of listening can facilitate greater understanding of complex issues, ease extreme feelings about them, and can even affect their opinion in subtle ways – ways the speaker may be unaware of. That is, the speakers may not admit that they have changed their minds, but the results from self‐report questionnaires demonstrated a change from their original viewpoints. Furthermore, the change in attitude was not correlated with the speaker’s feeling that the listener agreed with them. This finding demonstrates that listening, not the listener’s opinions, facilitated the broader point of view and increases in attitude complexity. In other words, agreement on a subject is not a necessary condition to gain the benefits of listening on attitudes. As more evidence, a quasi‐experimental study, conducted among Israeli employees both in public and private sectors, examined the effects of good listening on attitude complexity using a technique called Listening Circle, or the Council (Itzchakov & Kluger, 2017). In this technique, used here to improve listening in organizations, people sit in a circle and only one person talks at a time. It was found that the outcome of the intervention – increased levels of listening perception – can be a “trigger” for additional psychological processes related to emotion and cognition. Good listening decreased employees’ social anxiety, which allowed them a deeper introspection, as reflected by increased self‐awareness, and increased ambivalent as well as less extreme views. Employees who participated in a listening circle expressed a more complex attitude towards their supervisor than employees who participated in a workshop on assertiveness. That is, they were able to report that they see both positive and negative aspects in their supervisor, rather than viewing their supervisor as either good or bad. These findings suggest that listening could highlight both the positive and the negative aspects of an attitude. It is possible that managers who listen to their subordinates may increase their awareness of their shortcomings, reducing or eliminating the need to provide feedback (Itzchakov & Kluger, 2017; Itzchakov & Kluger, 2018).

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Listening and Burnout

Another organizational outcome of good listening is decreased levels of burnout. This o ­ utcome of listening has a direct impact on the organization – an organization characterized by high levels of burnout among its employees may suffer from decreased performance and increased levels of turnover and absenteeism (Swider & Zimmerman, 2010). Various findings support the negative association between good listening and burnout. For example, a study conducted among students from four cultures (Israeli, Israeli Arab, Hungarian, and North American) found that the perceived availability of non‐judgmental listening is negatively correlated with self‐reported burnout (Pines, Ben‐Ari, Utasi, & Larson, 2002). In a study of German employees, Lloyd et al. (2014) found an inverse relationship between perceived supervisor’s listening and turnover intentions. Theorell and colleagues (2013), studying the connection between listening and emotional exhaustion, found a positive association between employees’ perception of a non‐listening boss and employees’ emotional exhaustion. Their findings also indicated that a non‐listening boss is one of the predictors for depressive symptoms among employees (Theorell et al., 2013).

Listening and Leadership

Given the association between listening and a host of positive outcomes, it would make sense for leaders to strive toward listening excellence. Quality leadership has positive outcomes for organizations regarding team performance, learning, perceived effectiveness, and so forth (Burke et al., 2006; Wang, Waldman, & Zhang, 2014). As we will see, listening is strongly linked with leadership perception. A primary distinction in the leadership literature is that between a people‐oriented and a task‐oriented style (Kluger & Zaidel, 2013). Whereas a people‐oriented style can be described as relationship‐focused with an emphasis on communication and team building, a task‐­ oriented style is more focused on structure, roles, and hierarchy; it also emphasizes goal‐ setting. As Kluger and Zaidel demonstrated, destructive listening behaviors such as escaping the conversation, humiliating the speaker, and paying attention to phones or computers emerged as strong predictors of task‐oriented leadership, r = 0.71. On the contrary, constructive listening skills, such as reframing and verbal acknowledgments, were significant predictors of perceptions of leaders as people‐oriented, r = 0.67. These strong correlations are consistent with previous studies reporting associations between perceived listening and perceived leadership (Bechler & Johnson, 1995; Johnson & Bechler, 1998; Sharifirad, 2013).

What is Good Listening at Work? As we have seen, when an employee perceives that their manager listens well, they are more satisfied with their job, more committed to their organization, and more likely to attribute an ability to lead people to their managers. In addition, employees exposed to a listening environment (e.g., a listening workshop) develop attitudes that are more complex and less extreme, which are likely to be more adaptive both for themselves and for their organization. Although listening has powerful effects on various work outcomes, much of the empirical work was carried out without a clear definition of listening. In particular, most research is predicated on the notion that research participants perceive listening holistically. In other words, this work assumes that people tend to know whether the other person listens to them in general, even if they are not able to differentiate between the detailed elements of the listener’s behavior that led to the perception. But is this a good assumption? We tackle this question by first discussing how several researchers view the construct of listening at work, even though most of these works did not involve an empirical study. We then discuss the perception of listening, which is the most common operationalization of listening used in research on listening in the workplace.



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Carl Rogers was one of the most influential clinical psychologists in the twentieth century. In his 1952 Harvard Business Review article, he and co‐author Roethlisberger (1991/1952) recommended that managers learn to use Listening with Understanding, defined as “…­seeing the expressed idea and attitude from the other person’s point of view, sensing how it feels to the person, achieving his or her frame of reference about the subject being discussed” (p. 106). This view of what listening means was corroborated in a recent survey of approximately 3500 managers. Zenger & Folkman (2016) found that managers rated among the top 5% in listening: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Asked questions that promote discovery and insight. Made the speaker feel supported and conveyed confidence in them. Made the speaker feel that the listener is trying to help, not wanting to win an argument. Made suggestions in a manner that the speaker would accept and that opened up alternative paths to consider.

Thus, it appears that listening at work is construed similarly to concepts such as empathic or active‐empathic listening (Drollinger, Comer, & Warrington, 2006) and supportive listening (Jones, 2011). Moreover, it suggests that listening should be understood as a form of relating (Bodie, 2012) in the work place. Nevertheless, other researchers have pointed out two complications to the above definition. First, one theoretical paper suggested that the essence of useful managerial behavior is respectful inquiry (Van Quaquebeke & Felps, 2018). Respectful inquiry begins with asking open‐ended questions, which is followed by attentive listening. This view is consistent with findings suggesting that those who rated high in listening also ask questions that promote discovery and insight (Zenger & Folkman, 2016). Other studies have found that question asking is among those behaviors most strongly indicative of “good” listening (Bodie, St. Cyr, Pence, Rold, & Honeycutt, 2012; Jones & Bodie, 2014). Second, using data from in‐depth interviews with 42 bank employees, Schroeder (2016) found that the perception of listening could arise either because the manager was listening in a way that led to self‐insight, consistent with the above views, or because the manager acted on requests of the employees, such as obtaining requested resources and promoting the speaker. As such, the perception that a manager is listening is not construed only on the basis of the subordinate–manager communication episode, but also on the subordinate’s observations regarding the manager’s actions following the conversation (i.e., managerial follow‐ through). The latter is important to keep in mind because listening research relying on perception of listening may also tap the responsiveness of the manager and the ability of the manager to accommodate the information from the subordinate. Thus, perception of listening may reflect a halo effect with regards to the total pro‐speaker behaviors manifested by the manager, such that this perception includes behaviors beyond listening. Indeed, what constitutes effective listening at work is often measured with survey items requesting one person to report the perception of listening by another person (e.g., subordinate reporting manager’s listening or colleague’s listening). The items of such questionnaires include those tapping the perception of attention, comprehension, and intention (for review see Fontana, Cohen, & Wolvin, 2015). Nevertheless, these listening items tend to converge to one factor (Lipetz, Kluger & Bodie, 2018; Schroeder, 2016), or one second‐order factor (Kluger & Bouskila‐Yam, 2018).3 Given these results, Lipetz et al. (2018) proposed that “listening may even be measured sufficiently with a single item (‘He/She listened to me very well’), in a similar manner in which job satisfaction can be captured reliably with a single item” (p. 19). Thus, But see evidence that the perception of poor listening could form a separate factor than the perception of good listening in (Kluger & Zaidel, 2013; Lipetz et al., 2018).

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although the construct of listening is multidimensional and complex both as reviewed here and known in general (see Worthington & Bodie, 2018), it seems to be perceived holistically.

Barriers to Listening in Organizations In the previous sections, we reviewed the various ways that good listening can benefit organizations, managers, and employees, including increased performance, commitment, creativity, satisfaction, and so forth. This section focuses on listening barriers centering on individuals at work, examining topics such as management style, listener’s attachment style, and cultural diversity. The following findings suggest that managers should consider in which situations the use of listening will or will not lead to better outcomes.

Dominance vs. Prestige Although listening has positive outcomes, listening may also accrue costs, particularly regarding social status. People have two strategies for attaining social status: dominance, based on the use of force, intimidation, and coercion to induce fear; and prestige, based on the possession of skills and expertise desired by others (e.g., Cheng, Tracy, Foulsham, Kingstone, & Henrich, 2013; Kakkar & Sivanathan, 2017). Hurwitz and Kluger (2017) hypothesized that listening increases prestige‐based status, but decreases dominance‐based status. That is, managers who rely on intimidation to attain status would lose their status if they listened well because listening, as defined here, reduces fear. They conducted two experimental studies to test this hypothesis. They found, indeed, that good listeners are perceived as less dominant but more prestigious, while poor listeners are perceived as more dominant but less prestigious. In one of the experiments (3x2 design), 204 American college students were randomly assigned to recall a poor, typical, or good listening experience in which they were the listeners or speakers. Among the speakers, good listening experience decreased the attributions of dominance to the listeners, while the poor listening experience increased attributions of listeners’ dominance. Moreover, recalling a poor listening experience increased the perceived power disparity ­between the listener and the speaker; while the listener reported increased levels of self‐power, the speaker reported decreased levels of self‐power. In the good listening experience condition, such disparity was diminished. These findings suggest that good listening decreases the dominance attributed to the listener, but at the same time, good listening increases the listener’ prestige and diminishes the dyadic‐power gap. The Hurwitz and Kluger study points out one potential cost of listening and explains why many people in power are incentivized to listen poorly: To overcome this tendency, managers must first experience a gain in status that is prestige‐based. When this occurs, they may be more willing to give up their dominant style. Unless the natural force to maintain and obtain status is addressed with prestige, dominant managers are not likely to start listening because doing so, without experiencing prestige, would rob them of both dominance‐ and prestige‐ based means of attaining status. We suggest that understanding of listening and how to improve listening in organizations requires this type of theorizing to explain forces acting against listening.

Cultures

Scholars have found that listening is culture‐dependent, such that differences in listening styles and their effects have been found across cultures (Es‐Sabahi, 2015). Specifically, Es‐Shabahi explored the impact of leader’s listening quality on employee’s satisfaction, engagement, and trust, across three different countries: the United States, France, and Morocco. First, she found good



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listening positively associated with employees’ trust in their leader, a finding that is consistent with the previous literature. However, though the effect of good listening was large in the US, d = 0.94, and France, d = 0.84, it was less substantial in Morocco, d = 0.12. In addition, the same study showed that listening quality exerted a significant impact on employee engagement in France, d = 0.93, but less impact in the US, d = 0.04, and Morocco, d = −0.11. Another cultural difference regarding the impact of listening styles was found on satisfaction with the leader with greater impact in the US, d = 0.72, and less impact in France, d = 0.07, and Morocco, d = 0.07. Finally, Es‐Shabahi measured listening with the Facilitation Listening Scale (FLS; for a review, see Kluger & Bouskila‐Yam, 2018). The FLS contains sub‐scales of constructive listening (e.g., “listened to me attentively”) and destructive listening (e.g., “was distracted while I was talking”). Es‐Shabahi found differences in employees’ expectations regarding the listening style of their leaders. In the US and France, employees expected leaders to listen constructively; in Morocco, employees expected destructive listening. What this study illustrates is the need to adapt leadership behavior to different cultural standards. This is especially relevant to international organizations. Organizations can guide their managers to consider the expected listening behaviors in different cultures and their impact on (better) outcomes with subordinates. Moreover, these cross‐cultural differences may be explained by differences in managerial styles. For instance, it may be that economic uncertainty in Morocco results in managers using dominance to increase their status. This economic uncertainty may, in turn, also increase subordinate tolerance for dominance (Kakkar & Sivanathan, 2017).

Avoidance‐attachment Style

Another barrier to the benefits of listening is related to the speaker’s intrapersonal characteristic of avoidance‐attachment style. This behavioral style is characterized by self‐reliance and emotional distance from others. For people with high levels of avoidance‐attachment style, it is difficult to share feelings, depend on others, and to trust other persons. They prefer to see themselves as independent and avoid intimacy (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2016). Not surprisingly, they often dismiss the significance of interpersonal domains (Bartholomew, 1990). For example, Barthlomew (1990) defined the dismissing avoidance‐attachment style as characterized by a defensive denial of the need for attachment bonds or intimacy with others. Because of these characteristics, Castro, Kluger, and Itzchakov (2016) hypothesized that the benefit of being listened to diminishes as avoidant‐attachment style increases. To test their hypotheses, they conducted six experiments, a correlational study among Swedish employees, and a scenario experiment. Across studies, they found that avoidance‐attachment style attenuated the effect of listening on psychological safety. The researchers noted that although the interaction had a relatively small effect size, it has dramatic practical consequences in extreme cases (e.g., a very good listener with a speaker who is very high in avoidance-attachment style). Consequently, good listening will not benefit every employee. Therefore, when a manager uses good listening as a managerial tool, they should remember that some employees might not be affected by listening. For them, managers may consider crafting their listening in a way that would reduce the discomfort of the employee, perhaps by focusing the communication on technical issues that do not threaten the employee’s attachment system.

Summary We reviewed three reasons that will make listening less likely to occur (dominance, culture, and attachment style). We suggest that additional factors may also work against good listening at work. Perhaps the strongest force working against listening is fear of change: “Listening with understanding means taking a very real risk…you run the risk of being changed yourself”

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(Rogers & Roethlisberger, 1991/1952, p. 106). Because humans fluctuate between a need to change and a need to conserve their self‐view (Pasupathi, 2001), listening could occur only to the degree that both speaker and listener are open to change.

Listening: Level of Analysis Considerations In this section, we focus specifically on the different levels of analysis in listening research: organization, team, dyad, and individual. Each level of analysis may reveal different aspects of listening and its outcomes. Consequently, research focusing on a specific level of analysis has certain underlying assumptions that highlight some aspects of listening but, at the same time, ignore other aspects that could be significant regarding the phenomenon of listening. For instance, research focusing on the individual level assumes that good listening is a stable characteristic of the individual, across interactions with multiple others. However, dyadic level analyses reveal that listening is dependent on the unique relationship between the listener and speaker (Kluger et al., 2018; Pery & Malloy, 2019). Therefore, we suggest that future research consider this gap and consider the opportunities associated with each level of analysis. Further, we propose using Social Relations Modeling (Kenny, Kashy, & Cook, 2006; Malloy, 2018) to advance listening research in organizations, as will be further elaborated.

The Organizational Level of Analysis Although there is a paucity of research at the organizational level, work at this level generally compares organizations on some metric of listening culture and tests whether listening at the organizational level predicts differences in the performance of entire organizations (e.g., profitability). This view underlines organizational listening, meaning large‐scale listening of a specific organization. MacNamara (this volume) noted that organizations have policies, systems, technological, and cultural dimensions that create certain architectures. Whereas organizations built on an architecture of speaking focus on traditional push techniques such as advertising and media publicity, those built on an architecture of listening have (i) a culture open to listening; (ii) addressed the politics of listening; (iii) policies that solidify a commitment to listening; (iv) systems; (v) technologies; (vi) resources that allow large‐scale listening; (vii) plans to develop skills for listening; and (viii) abilities to articulate stakeholder voices. In a manner similar to MacNamara’s work, Glynn, Búrca, Brannick, Fynes, and Ennis (2003) classified 483 service organizations in Ireland on a listening continuum between “deaf” organizations, those that rarely or never measure customers’ opinions, to “total listening” organizations, those that use both information technologies and narrative approaches to gather information about customer’s opinion, including internal customers. They found that the degree that the organization listens predicts both service performance and business performance, and that this link becomes stronger in organizations that have a high level of technology. One should note that listening as defined in organizational‐level research is somewhat different from the definition used in the other research reviewed earlier. Therefore, it will be desirable to have future studies assessing listening effects at this level, while measuring whether aggregate perceptions of employees of listening by other people (rather than having information technologies to collect opinions) also affect organizational outcomes.

The Team Level of Analysis Several studies have assessed listening as a team/plant characteristic (Johnston & Reed, 2017; Johnston, Reed, & Lawrence, 2011; Reed et al., 2014; Reed, Goolsby, & Johnston, 2016). These studies measure the listening quality of the team according to the general experience of



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each team member based on the overall listening in their team (e.g., “the people in my team listen to what I have to say”). Thus, this level of analysis aggregates individual‐level variables into a more global assessment representing the average or group perceptions of listening. For example, a study which was conducted among US employees in different positions and locations working for one corporation, found that listening environment is associated with employee commitment and perceived performance (Reed et al., 2016). Team level analysis is based on the consensus among team members regarding the perception of listening. That is, the assumption is that each member of the group experiences approximately the same quality of listening. As will be shown in the Dyadic Level of Analysis section, consensus explains only a small amount of variance in the perception of listening.

The Individual Level of Analysis Currently, most existing research lies at this level of analysis (Bergeron & Laroche, 2009; Levinson et al., 1997; Lloyd et al., 2014). As we reviewed already, individual‐level listening has positive effects regarding job satisfaction, commitment, work attitudes, burnout, organizational citizenship behavior, and so forth. Because listening is analyzed at the individual level, these studies assume that listening is a stable characteristic of the listener. That is, the listener is expected to show the same quality of listening regardless of speaker. For example, some of these studies measure the correspondence between supervisor’s listening and an outcome among their subordinates (Lloyd et al., 2014). This approach assumes that the supervisor is supposed to have the same quality of listening regardless of whom they listens to.

The Dyadic Level of Analysis Although the previously described outcomes of listening certainly add to our understanding of listening, researchers should also consider the unique quality of listening that may emerge as individuals engage in dyadic communication. Using Social Relations Modeling (SRM; Kenny et al., 2006; Malloy, 2018), it is possible to deepen the investigation of listening and to estimate the effects related to the listener, the speaker, and the unique relationship between them. The SRM analysis assumes that each rating (e.g., the listening quality of a peer or the manager) stems from four different sources: 1. The Perceiver: Some employees might feel that nobody listens to them, whereas others may feel that everyone listens to them. To the extent that raters have a general tendency to rate others in their teams at similar levels, the variance stems from the perceiver and indicates one type of an individual difference measure – tendency to perceive. 2. The Target/consensus: Some employees might be rated by all their peers as poor listeners, whereas others may be rated by all their peers as good listeners. To the extent that ratees have a general tendency to be rated by their team members at similar levels, the variance stems from the target and indicates another type of an individual difference measure – a tendency to listen (or more accurately a tendency to elicit a consensus about perceived listening). This is a measure of consensus and estimates listening as a trait, as used in most existing listening research, only in a more accurate way. 3. The Dyad: Some “magic” that causes a rating in a dyad to be beyond the expected from each of the dyad members. For instance, a team member that rates the manager beyond the manager’s consensus, and despite the employee’s tendency to perceive most others as non‐listeners. 4. A Residual: Some other source of influence on the rating, one that is not due to any of the above sources and assumed to stem from random and unknown systematic errors.

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After calculating the proportion of variance accounted for by each of the four sources, one can estimate whether listening stems mainly from the perceptions of the employees providing the ratings, from their listening trait indexed by the consensus, or from the dyad level. Other questions of interest we can address using the SRM are about general reciprocity and dyadic reciprocity. General reciprocity would indicate that those who perceive that all others are good listeners would also be perceived by all others as good listeners. Dyadic reciprocity would indicate that when one rates a specific other as a good listener, they tends to be rated as a good listener by that specific other. With the SRM method, it is also possible to measure several variables (e.g., listening and willingness to help). When armed with such data, more complex questions can be asked. For example, would a person that receives a particular rating of listening be willing to help the person who assigned them that rating.

Dyadic Insights on Listening

Using SRM, research has mounted a substantial challenge to the idea that some people are consistently good or bad listeners (Kluger et al., 2018; Pery & Malloy, 2019). In particular, at least some of the beneficial outcomes of good listening  –  intimacy, organizational citizenship behavior, and even speech quality – have a stronger correlation at the dyadic level than at the individual level. In other words, it is not just the listener’s listening skills that make them a good listener, or even a speaker’s tendency to perceive listeners well. Rather, good listening can be explained more by the unique pairing of the listener and speaker than their individual skills as a listener or speaker. Moreover, Kluger’s team found that the consensus of “listening quality” for unacquainted participants was practically zero. In well‐acquainted work teams, the consensus of listening quality of team members accounted for less than 15% of the variance. These findings go hand in hand with consensus estimations of interpersonal liking that reach 10–14% (Kenny, Albright, Malloy, & Kashy, 1994). In sharp contrast, the dyad explained over 40% of the variance in well‐acquainted work teams. These findings are also similar to meta‐analytic findings regarding perceived support, where 62% of the variance was attributed to specific dyads, 27% to the perceived, and only 7% to consensus (Lakey & Orehek, 2011). Thus, variance partitioning of listening is similar to variance partitioning of other relational constructs, indicating that one becomes a good or a poor listener largely as a function of a unique partner. The revelation about the dyadic nature of listening does not end in the explanation of the dyadic source to listening perception. SRM analysis also reveals that the outcomes of listening are realized most dominantly in the dyadic level, such that people feel more workplace intimacy with the people that listen to them and are more willing to assist these people beyond the job requirements. This means that nearly anyone can be a good listener, depending on to whom they are listening. Based on the limitations associated with the level of analysis of listening and the benefits of using SRM, we propose that future studies carefully consider the level of analysis and its attending limitations. Future research may seek to crack the mystery of what creates good listening dyads, that is, what is the unique “chemistry” that creates an experience of listening. Some theoretical clues about what happens when listening occurs can be found in the notion of interpersonal transcendence, which is an “absorption in the unfolding conversation where participants experience a sense of discovery, creation, and a feeling of connection, or ‘sharedness,’ that could only be achieved via interaction with another” (Greene & Herbers, 2011, p. 67). When such an experience is created between two individuals it is likely to affect the organization because it can create effective collaboration in problem solving. Note, however, that the construct of interpersonal transcendence has not yet been applied to dyadic combination. Nevertheless, where the black box of “chemistry” in a dyad is poorly understood, the importance of the dyad in understanding listening is critical. This view of the importance of the dyad in listening at work is completely consistent with realizations of organizational behavior scholars that dyads are the basic building blocks of organizations (e.g., Joshi & Knight, 2015).



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Conclusion In this chapter, we have explored research findings in a variety of areas, including the o ­ utcomes of listening in organizations, the potential effect of listening on speakers, “good listening” in work, and organizational barriers to listening. We also described four levels of analysis of listening (organizational, team, individual, and dyad) and underlined their advantages and disadvantages. Finally, we proposed that dyadic analysis can advance research in the field and enrich the understanding of listening. What are the implications of these findings for organizations and managers? First, organizations and managers can use good listening as an effective tool to increase organizational performance, employees’ commitment, and creativity. Additionally, good listening can improve the well‐being of individuals by increasing job satisfaction and decreasing burnout and e­ motional exhaustion. To achieve these goals, organizations and managers could use existing listening training approaches (see Brownell, this volume), consider means to reduce distractions when listening to employees, schedule time devoted to listening in addition to or instead of scheduling performance appraisals (Kluger & Lehmann, 2018), and devote resources to study the effects of listening, or lack thereof, on the organization. In sum, this chapter has shown that organizations and managers are set to profit from investing in listening, and that by taking into account forces that may act against listening, they can produce benefits that are both tangible and economic in nature, as well as soft and humanistic in nature, for the benefit of all involved.

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11

Media Studies Kate Lacey

The modern world is permeated by mediated sound. The technologies of sound recording, amplification, and transmission have transformed public and private life and the spaces we inhabit. Our sense perceptions – the ways we see and hear and otherwise experience the world around us – have been mediatized. Mediated words and music constitute identities and channel desires, knowledge, relationships, and politics. Media provide records of the past and populate our visions of the future. Listening is an important key to the experience of and engagement with media, and the ways in which we can engage with each other through media. This chapter explores the many ways listening features in media scholarship, despite the tendency of the field to take listening for granted. Media Studies is a relative newcomer to the academy, though studies of media are not new. Although now securely established, there are ongoing debates about whether Media Studies is a discipline per se, or whether it is an interdisciplinary field (Miller & Kraidy, 2016). It is ­certainly defined by its object of study – albeit one that is ever changing and expanding – rather than a specific methodology or a canonical literature (Katz, Peters, Liebes, Orloff, & Press, 2003). Institutionally, Media Studies took root in both social science and arts departments, and especially in the bridging space of cultural studies. It deals in both quantitative and qualitative research, in both theory and practice. It is promiscuous in its attachments to other disciplines and feeds voraciously on them. And it proliferates sub‐fields specializing in one or another media form. Of course, many, if not most other disciplines necessarily engage at some level with the media and forms of mediation. Indeed, some would argue that there are few fields of modern life that have not been “mediatized,” that is to say, reconfigured in substantial ways by the pervasive logics and experience of the media (Hepp, Hjarvard, & Lundby, 2015). Others argue we no longer live with media, but in media (Deuze, 2011); that media have become environmental, the context within which human experience in all its complexity is unfolding (Peters, 2015; Silverstone, 2007); that media, in complicated ways, construct reality itself (Couldry & Hepp, 2017). To complicate matters further, Media Studies goes by different names in different contexts. For example, it is sometimes used as a synonym for Communication Studies; in other contexts where it is closer to Cultural Studies, its identity as a politically driven  field of critical scholarship, distinct from the more “administrative” ­ traditions of Communication Studies, is ardently defended.

The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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The Disregard of Listening The difficulties of defining the discipline notwithstanding, it is the case that Media Studies – at least in its dominant Anglo‐American incarnations considered here – has rarely addressed the question of listening explicitly or in a sustained fashion. Listening is not featured as a keyword in any of the standard textbooks, though it might be mentioned in passing under entries on “audience” or “sound”. While the oversight is finally beginning to be addressed, this overview will demonstrate how the question of listening has always, at least implicitly, informed many of the most important aspects of the field. With this context in mind, we begin with the broad historical, conceptual, and methodological reasons for the marginalization of listening in the field. Media Studies, as an identifiable subject area, was forged in the 1970s in the confluence of newspaper, film, and cultural studies, though it was studies of television that originally and most powerfully shaped the field, particularly focusing on questions of ownership and control, content, and representation. Insofar as reception came on to the agenda, audiences would be conceptualized in terms of readers, spectators, and viewers. Film and television were long studied almost exclusively as visual, rather than audio‐visual media. Their genealogy was generally traced from photography through moving pictures to talkies and television, sidestepping the equally relevant histories of phonography, telegraphy, and radio. Eventually, the sounds of these media came to be analyzed more routinely; but even now, listening itself as a category remains under‐theorized and under‐researched. Part of the explanation for this neglect is revealed in the everyday parlance of seeing a film or watching television. Such turns of phrase the orthodox hierarchy of the senses which privileges the visual over the auditory, the widespread misconception that listening is somehow natural, ahistorical, and passive – or simply the same as hearing (see Lipari, this volume). The other reason, though, lies in the multi‐disciplinary tributaries that have fed into the field of Media Studies. For example, early studies of the press tended to be driven by political philosophy and the role of journalism in the formation of public opinion. These set the scene for studies that would concentrate on the practices and ethics of media output as somehow separate from the practices and ethics of reception. The post‐war formation of Media Studies was similarly driven in part by sociological and political concerns about the impacts of the media, particularly with the increasing pervasiveness of television. But literary departments also turned to “reading” the media as “texts,” applying theories of genre, narrative, and semiotics, for example, to formal, ideological, and critical analyses. Media Studies in the digital age still bears all these traces, while making new connections with fields like Informatics and Digital Humanities. On the whole, then, Media Studies has long been dominated by the visual. But mass communications research has its roots in the rise of radio, and it is to the 1920s and 1930s that we must turn to find the foundational texts concerned with mediated listening.

Tuning in to Listener Research In the USA, with radio funded by advertising, there was a commercial incentive to investigate listening habits and tastes, if only to the extent of understanding listeners as prospective customers. Within this context, in the depths of the Great Depression, the first classic study of listening was conducted by Cantril and Allport (1935). The Psychology of Radio was pioneering in its attempt to connect the institutional, regulatory, and presentational forms of radio to the “interests, the desires, and the attitudes” (p. 4) of radio listeners as both consumers and ­citizens. While it did engage in the kind of empirical demographic description of the audience (from census data, surveys, listeners’ letters) also being conducted by the broadcasters and advertisers,



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the study endeavored to delve deeper into the complexities of what they ­understood to be an entirely novel means of communication. Cantril and Allport were particularly interested in how listening to the radio compared to reading print and looking at stage and screen. They hoped in this way to gauge the impacts of a dispersed and domestic listening public as a form of imagined community. The study recognized the detachment of speaker and audience as freeing the listener from the conventional constraints of co‐presence, while at the same time both unsettling and restraining the conventions of public performance. The radio was described as an “agent of democracy,” with the potential to increase the number of “good listeners” (p. 26), but the authors also considered it a tool that would inevitably “standardize and stereotype” mental life (p. 22). Here, we see concentration being valued over distraction, intention over accident, activity over p ­ assivity. Such values shaped both public and academic debates about listening throughout the “long” twentieth century. Much of The Psychology of Radio was devoted to laboratory‐based research. Researchers examined listeners’ skills and their predilections in relation to broadcast voices and what this might convey about personality, gender, authority, and social relations. They were also concerned with testing for the most effective and appealing forms of broadcast presentation in terms of listeners’ interest, comprehension, and persuasion. Despite recognizing how listeners influence broadcasting in various ways, the authors reached the conclusion that “listeners must be ­satisfied with the role of passive listening” (p. 265). Cantril went on to play a key role in launching the Radio Research Project (RRP) in 1937. An initiative of the Rockefeller Foundation under the direction of Paul Lazarsfeld, the RRP aspired to investigate “the essential value of radio to all types of listeners” (The Essential Value, 1937). Lazarsfeld’s first report, Radio and the Printed Page (1940), examined radio’s potential to develop “serious listening” – the term he gave to careful, readerly, and unemotional attention to programming with educational or democratic intent. By the time of its publication, with war taking hold in Europe, the question of radio’s propaganda power, for good or ill, was a matter of urgent concern; but Lazarsfeld concluded that any hope for (American) radio as a propagator of serious listening was “groundless” (p.48). Too many people (those described as being on “lower cultural levels”), the study claimed, wanted to listen simply for pleasure or for confirmation of their existing views. To this extent, the study chimed with prevailing cultural anxieties about listening that, despite the novelty of the communication form, mapped onto quite conventional and classed cultural hierarchies (Goodman, 2011). The broader insight of the study, though, was that listening needed to be understood as embedded in everyday lives as well as wider social structures. This perspective has certainly resonated in studies of radio listening, which confirm listeners in their homes turn to their radios and record players not only for content but also for companionship and routine (Hobson, 1980; Mendelsohn, 1964), a habit known as “secondary listening.” Much of the scholarship on radio, particularly the cultural histories of broadcasting in different national contexts, privileges listening in such domestic and familial environments. But there is also an important body of work on mobile, ambient, and group listening in public and private spaces (e.g. Bull, 2000; Kassabian, 2013; Lacey, 2013, pp. 132–158). In fact, the two traditions are entwined in Raymond Williams’ famous term, “mobile privatisation” (1974/2004). Here, the social application of radio technology as broadcasting is understood as a response to the specific communicative needs thrown up by the complex mix of social conditions in the early twentieth century, not least (sub)urbanization and automobility. Lazarsfeld’s primary interest, however, was less in domesticated media listening or even media research per se than in general questions of methods and methodology. Working with Robert Merton, some of the audience research techniques he developed with the RRP continue to resonate. In their lab‐based studies, for example, participants were asked to press green or red buttons to indicate in real time when they were enjoying or annoyed and bored

184 Lacey by what they were listening to. This “Program Analyzer” was soon adopted by market researchers and ratings companies (Hollonquist & Suchman, 1943), and can be seen as a ­precursor to the sophisticated digital tracing of current economies of attention. But Merton and Lazarsfeld’s lab techniques were also complemented by regular panel (focus group) discussions in which participants could reflect on their responses, and where researchers could analyze the effects of group dynamics on individual preferences. In pioneering the influential “uses and gratifications approach,” this was a significant contribution to the development of qualitative media research (Katz, Blumler & Gurevitch, 1973), though the historiography commonly underplays its origins in a practice of listening to listeners. Lazarsfeld (1940) concluded that radio was failing to meet its potential to supplement “the functions of reading” (p. 93). In other words, any efforts to inform, educate, and include the kinds of people who were not already active members of a “serious” reading public were failing to compete with the attractions of “a women’s serial, a ‘how to get along’ program, or a quiz contest” (p. 93). Finding that “the more suggestible man” was more likely to be a listener than a reader (p. 257), Lazarsfeld (1940) suggested educators needed to “improve” rather than ignore popular programming if radio were to “take a real step beyond the achievements of print in the communication of ideas” (p. 93). Other work conducted under the auspices of the RRP reflects this perspective. Recognizing that devices like the Program Analyzer could not measure responses to programs listened to habitually over long periods of time, Herta Herzog’s study of women’s daytime serial listening pioneered a uses and gratifications approach to audience research that combined content analysis, qualitative interviews with listeners, and comparisons with what was known about non‐ listeners. Although “intermediality” is a much later term used to describe connections between and convergence of media, Herzog realized women’s radio listening needed to be understood in relation to their engagement with newspapers, magazines, and film, and, indeed, in relation to their broader participation in public and civic affairs. Her work recognized the complexity and, indeed, the autonomy, of women’s listening. It thus lay the foundation for much later feminist research into women and soap operas, particularly in identifying “emotional release,” “wishful thinking,” and “sources of advice” among women’s “listening gratifications” (1943, pp. 23–32). The critique of a patriarchal culture industry behind this typology is easier to see in her famous essay for the Frankfurt School, “On Borrowed Experience,” which described how some women listened as a way of “letting themselves go emotionally,” some for a “wishful remodelling of [their] ‘drudgery,’” and some for “recipes for adjustment […] to bear the kind of life they were living” (1941, p. 69). Working alongside Herzog on the content analysis of the daytime serial was another émigré, Rudolf Arnheim (1943). Better known now as a film and art critic, he had authored one of the first scholarly monographs on radio. Published in 1936, Radio: The Art of Sound (notably subtitled Art of Listening in its German version) was concerned primarily with aesthetics, ­particularly the way in which sounds dislocated from their source open up a gap between sense perception and cognition. Like so many of his contemporaries, Arnheim pressed for a ­purposeful, disciplined listening in the usual terms of discrimination, focus, and recall in the service of self‐improvement. But he also acknowledged that radio could, indeed should, be a space for experimentation and encounter with the unfamiliar. There was one more associate of the RRP whose influence on the scholarship of listening has been particularly profound, albeit hardly uncontested. Theodor Adorno began as director of the music division in 1938 charged with introducing a more theoretical and “critical” approach that would complement the RRP’s otherwise more “administrative” research. Little of Adorno’s work with the project was published at the time. However, an influential lecture he gave soon after his arrival was later published as “A Social Critique of Radio Music” (1945). Here, he argued the mechanization of music by recording and transmission produces “­commodity listening” which seeks “to dispense as far as possible with any effort on the part



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of the recipient” (p. 211). Yet, despite serving up standardized music in standardized formats, the logics of broadcasting would fool listeners into believing radio served their individual desires and could enhance their powers of musical discrimination. Furthermore, by playing excerpts and highlights  –  and by virtue of the schedule’s flattening out of context and the technology’s flattening out of sonic complexity  –  radio inevitably produces “atomistic and quotation listening,” (p. 214). For Adorno, all this represents a “retrogression of listening” (p. 213). Meanwhile, the “veil of pseudo‐individualism” produced by the culture industry – the false consciousness imposed on listeners by the schedules – made him skeptical of any “first‐ hand information from listeners” (p. 216), and, by extension, the kind of research being undertaken by others in the project. For very different reasons, skepticism towards audience research also characterized the early years of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). As a public service broadcaster funded by license fee and with a monopoly on output, there was no commercial imperative to ­investigate listening habits. More significant, though, was the Director General John Reith’s principled objection to the pursuit of ratings and the tyranny of listener satisfaction. The indiscriminate reach of broadcasting meant for him that its latent listeners had to be conceived of as a nationwide audience and a general public. He believed broadcasters had a moral duty to give listeners the quality and diversity of programming they needed, whether or not they were aware they needed it and still less whether or not they wanted it. It was a position driven by a kind of democratic and pedagogic elitism, but it was ultimately a paternalist policy that could not survive, ­particularly with the approach of war when the question of public morale came to the fore. A Listener Research department was set up in 1936, with Robert Silvey appointed as its first director. At first it concentrated on qualitative research in relation to specific programming, but later undertook more general surveys of listening habits (Silvey, 1974). It was Silvey who commissioned Hilda Jennings and Winifred Gill (1939) to undertake a study of working‐class listeners in Bristol. This pioneering account of radio listening in everyday life was a foretaste of the ethnographic turn in academic audience research of the 1980s that would flesh out the idea of the “active audience” introduced in Stuart Hall’s (1980) famous “Encoding/Decoding” essay. Though most of the research into active audiences focused on television – conceptualized soley as viewers rather than also as listeners – the approach marked a significant shift away from the prevailing stereotype of audiences of “mass” media as suggestible and passive.

Listening Publics and Active Audiences “Audience” is a word that belies its roots in the act of audition, revealing how media consumers are positioned as listeners in a public communicative exchange. However, in cultures that value (both politically and economically) the freedom of expression and “having a voice,” the act of listening tends to be correspondingly undervalued or simply overlooked. For most of the last century, media listening could be measured and monetized only in the aggregate  –  hence the focus on listening figures in terms of reach, frequency, and demographics. Even in the digital age, online listening is tracked predominantly in terms of visits and clicks. In other words, the act of listening itself is rarely interrogated as listening, but rather sublimated into terms like reception, attention, and consumption. There are many examples in media scholarship centered on the language of activity and participation, on speaking up rather than listening (see Macnamara, this volume). Dialogic models of communication focus on interactivity as a sequence of speech acts. Critiques of mass media are often grounded, at least implicitly, in a suspicion of systems where ­listeners cannot take their turn in the role of speaker. A formative version of this argument was made by Bertolt Brecht (1930/1979). He famously declared that radio could

186 Lacey be “the most wonderful communication medium imaginable” if it were capable of “making the listener not only hear but speak” (p. 25). It is a formulation that has inspired all sorts of participatory forms of media communication, from Brecht’s own experimental radio plays through vox pops, phone‐ins, talk shows, community and activist media, and more recently the impulsive embrace of interactive, social, and user‐generated media. Critics write about the “post‐audience” age (Cavalcante, Press & Sender, 2017), where the distinctions between producer and consumer are collapsed into an awkward vocabulary of “produsers” and “­prosumers” that tend to ride roughshod over persisting inequalities. Tiziano Bonini (2014) has offered a more nuanced historical approach in his charting of radio history as a four‐stage lessening of the distance between listener and producer. The classic one‐to‐many broadcasting model begins as an invisible medium for an invisible public. In the post‐war period, it gradually becomes an invisible medium for an audible public, with the rise of community stations and more on‐air participation by listeners. The third stage, beginning around the turn of this century, refers to an invisible medium for a readable public, as listeners made themselves known via email, texts, blogs, and increasingly also web‐ and podcasts. The most recent stage sees radio becoming a visible medium for a networked public. Here, following danah boyd’s schema of networked publics (2011), the digitized contributions of listeners become not only visible but permanently available, sharable, scalable, and reproducible. This historical trajectory should not, however, be understood as a teleology – and certainly not as simple technological determinism  –  as all the various listening positions described continue to co‐exist. Indeed, the current visibility of the listener’s role as co‐producer or co‐curator might act as an explicit invitation to look for precedents and continuities in the historical record. The implication in most of the non‐specialist literature, however, is that audiences need to be coaxed, inspired, or jolted out of the passivity and powerlessness of the listening position. Listeners cut off from the evidence of their eyes are often (mis)understood as being dangerously gullible: witness the mythology that has grown up around the ostensible panic during Orson Welles’s radio dramatization of War of the Worlds (Schwartz, 2015). It is not such a leap to think of listeners as particularly susceptible to propaganda, as Marshall McLuhan (1964) did when he claimed that German audiences of Nazi radio, “danced entranced to the tribal drum of radio” (p. 135). McLuhan’s claim was not grounded in historical research (indeed he recognized that Hitler came to power despite having been banned from the airwaves during the Weimar Republic), but in a (radicalized) argument about how radio “intimately” affected listeners in a subliminal echo of “tribal horns and antique drums” (p. 137) masquerading as private experience.

The Long View of Mediated Listening Of more lasting significance was McLuhan’s broader contribution to “medium theory,” ­particularly his description of a return to the logics of acoustic space heralded by the rise of electronic culture. According to this schema, the historical shift from orality to literacy had seen the visual logics of objectivity, linear causality, and individualism supersede the auditory logics of experience, simultaneity, and collectivity. The modern media age becomes an era of “secondary orality” (Ong, 1982), a new form of orality grafted onto the bedrock of literacy and able to operate at the scale of the global village. By extension, the contemporary condition could equally be described as an era of “secondary aurality” with listening returned as an activity to a re‐auralised public sphere (Lacey, 2013). The rise of sound studies has further stimulated the historicization of mediated listening, particularly in relation to technological change, notably sound recording and telecommunication (see Brounley, this volume). Jonathan Sterne’s (2003) excavation of the scientific and



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medical discourses underlying modern “audile techniques” (culturally defined listening ­practices) has been particularly influential in recognizing listening as a cultural and mediatized activity as much as a physiological one, and therefore bound up in the exercise of power (pp. 137–138). His work critiques the way in which listening has artificially (theologically, philosophically, and technologically) been separated from the other senses in a process of rationalization that produced the “individuation of acoustic space” so influential in the story of mediated sound (p. 155). Sterne has also helped open up the question of listening in relation to media beyond the usual suspects of radio, records, and screen media. The Audible Past offered a careful genealogy of listening, demonstrating how sound technologies became sound media only when “articulated through the organization of new media industries and new middle‐class practices” (2003, p. 177). It is one expression of the way in which scholars are beginning to recognize the historical specificity but also the multiplicity of competing auditory regimes, akin to the work that has been done in visual cultural studies (Lacey, 2000). That listening is a historically contingent practice can become audibly evident by listening to “outdated” material in the archive, when a listener unaccustomed to once inaudible (unnoticed) cultural and technical codes fleetingly occupies “the unfamiliar position of the alienated listener” (Cook, 2011, p. 50). Of course, there might be other ways in which listeners can be alienated by the dominant codes of audio production in real time. For instance, Jennifer Stoever’s (2016) The Sonic Color Line explores how listeners of color have long had to negotiate the dominance of “white sonic masculinity” because of the way whiteness has been sonically coded as inaudible, yet normal and desirable.

Listening and the Production of Meaning The dislocation of listening from the sound source affected the forms and practices of media production, with concomitant impacts on cultural and political life. Perhaps the most profound example of this is the way in which broadcasters gradually understood that their large listening publics could not be addressed using the rhetorical forms long associated with public speaking (Cardiff, 1980). Sermons, lectures, and stump speeches did not translate well to the radio when most listeners were listening in small numbers in domestic settings. Gradually, a more mundane, more intimate, and more conversational style of public speech came to the fore that over time seemed to lessen the gulf between leaders and listening citizens. Broadcasting produced intimate publics (Loviglio, 2005), in part because listening to a voice reveals more about a personality than through reading or image alone. Intimacy was a lesson learned in the sphere of entertainment, too. For example, singers learned to croon into their microphones, and music producers invested in “easy listening” genres (Keightley, 2008; Taylor, 2002). Techniques like laugh tracks and other studio surrogates were also devised to make isolated listeners feel they were participating in a performance or public event, however distant (Giotta, 2017). This “double articulation of broadcasting” (Scannell, 1991, p. 1) institutionally structures listening as a form of eavesdropping. In Communication Studies, this is commonly understood in psychological terms as a form of parasocial interaction (Horton & Wohl, 1956). In the Media and Cultural Studies tradition, it is more often understood as a form of public participation that is potentially democratizing. Listening to radio enabled citizens to hear “ordinary” voices like theirs participating in the public sphere for the first time. It was also a way of listening out beyond national borders (Badenoch & Föllmer, 2018) and beyond the confines of class, race, and immediate community (Hilmes, 1997; Scannell & Cardiff, 1991). In some contexts, listening was regarded as a ­freedom from reading that would open up a world of public life and letters to populations otherwise excluded (Lacey, 2013). Eventually, it helped recalibrate conventions of “expert‐speakers” and “lay‐hearers” (Livingstone & Lunt, 2002, p. 129). Proliferating

188 Lacey images of ­listeners in advertising copy and listings magazines also helped underscore the sense of being part of a wider public. These “audience effects” (Peters, 1997, p. 14)  –  making their imagined listeners both audible and visible – were just one of the ways in which producers allayed their anxieties about the invisibility and unknowability of the distant audience, despite the fact audience members have persistently interacted in manifold ways to shape how radio developed (Razlogova, 2011). The invisibility of the text at the point of reception presented another hurdle. The question was how to compensate for the absence of visual codes, that is how to anchor meaning for listeners despite the evanescence of speech and ambiguity of sound. Media scholarship has at times framed these questions within a vocabulary of lack or disability, referring to radio as a “blind” or “invisible” medium (Chignell, 2009, pp. 67–70). Elsewhere, the discourse of deficiency has been deliberately eschewed in favor of exploring the opportunities and freedoms of acousmatic sound, and of thinking about what might constitute “radiogenic” qualities (Feldman, Mead & Tonning, 2014; Lacey, 2013; VanCour, 2018). Either way, many textbooks on radio looked to the semiotics of sound and the spoken word to explore the textual techniques pursued to anchor listeners’ interpretations (Crisell, 2006; Shingler & Wieringa, 1998). More recent research has begun to flesh out the contingent material, technical, and institutional conditions that produce the particular aesthetic forms of “modern sound culture” (Bronfman, 2016; VanCour, 2018).

Practices of Listening Institutional and textual studies have tended to dominate contemporary radio studies, but one of the first books to deal carefully with how institutional and textual practices connect with the practices of listeners was Susan Douglas’s Listening In (1999). Through careful attention to different forms of American radio programming, she showed listening to be a cultural practice that reflects and reinforces patterns of social, political, and cultural change. Douglas also re-cognized and shared in the sheer pleasure, or “zen,” of listening. In the process, she identified three overlapping cognitive modes of listening that radio has fostered to varying degrees in various contexts – informational, dimensional, and associational. Informational listening is about listening for content, dimensional listening refers to the labor involved in imagining the three‐dimensional context of the sounds heard, and associational listening encapsulates the affective ways in which sounds can trigger imagination, emotion, mood, or memory. Douglas also charted ways in which different genres in different historical moments work to produce different forms of listening. In terms of music, for example, she argued that “concentrated” listening (habitually prized over “distracted” or “background” listening) was first associated with early “musical appreciation” programs; later it translated to the “breakout” listening encouraged by DJs on “free‐form” FM stations in the 1960s and 1970s, and later still it became the “fidelity listening” of audiophiles immersed in the stereophonic soundscapes of the 1980s. In other words, while listeners actively adapt their listening according to content and context, they are also taking up a listening position invited by the text and underscored by the way changing technologies like stereo and surround sound position the listener in acoustic space. Neil Verma (2012) has proposed the term “audioposition” for the listening position produced by the auditory cues and compositional codes in radio drama, or “the theatre of the mind.” “Audioposition” is a useful sharpening of “point of audition,” often used in film studies as a sonic parallel to a “point of view,” inasmuch as it stresses that the listener is positioned by the text. This has echoes of the turn to apparatus theory in 1970s film studies to describe the (ideological) “interpellation” of the spectator (Rosen, 1986). Such film theory rarely considered the spectator as also listening. An important exception was The Acoustic Mirror (1988), Kaya Silverman’s groundbreaking book on feminism, psychoanalysis, and the



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female voice in film, in which the act of listening is acknowledged as being “as fully structured as the act of viewing a film” (p. 42). The radio apparatus, meanwhile, has rarely been interrogated from a psychoanalytic perspective, despite the potential power of the disembodied voice on the psyche, and despite the description of psychoanalysis itself as a talking and listening cure (Breton, 2013; Lloyd, 2009). If textual analysis has been one major route to understanding listening practices in relation to radio, then ethnography has been the other, although the two need not be mutually exclusive. Media ethnographies are primarily concerned with the ways in which media ­technologies come to be embedded in everyday lives, especially the processes of adoption, routinization, and adaptation. They are particularly sensitive to how media are differently experienced according to categories like gender, class, race, and age, or within specific communities of location or taste. Ethnographies have been particularly important in studying the role of radio as a tool of social development, and indeed make up a large part of the available scholarship on mediatized listening in the Global South (Bessire & Fisher, 2012; Jayaprakash, 2000; Murphy & Kraidy, 2003; Tacchi, 2009).

Listening and the Screen The question of listening in Media Studies is most fully developed in research about radio. Radio has been a resilient medium, not only surviving the rise of television but thriving in the age of the Internet, taking on different forms and appearing on all sorts of different platforms, and converging with other screen media (see also Bond, this volume). The proliferation of podcasting, streaming services, and audio apps, all accessible on multiple and mobile platforms, and often used to accompany other on and offline activities, means mediatized listening is ever more deeply embedded in modern culture. Media Studies, of course, is concerned with exploring how different communities adopt and adapt these various listening opportunities. Much is made of the greater accessibility, flexibility, choice, and control afforded to listeners through new interfaces, not least the “liberation” from the schedule; the rise in secondary listening while engaged in other screen‐based activities; and the more porous divide between listeners and producers (Dubber, 2014; Loviglio & Hilmes, 2013; Spinelli & Dann, 2019). But while scholars widely take radio as a reference point in understanding new digital genres and platforms for audio, Berry (2016) reminds us that the connections and contexts might not always be apparent or important to many listeners of new media sound. Audiovisual media also involve listening, of course, although it is often something of a blind spot in media histories and theory, despite the growing number of studies on the techniques, functions, and aesthetics of sound on screen (Brophy, 2008; Hilmes, 2008). For example, a recent film studies anthology with the subtitle, An Introduction to the Senses (Elsaesser & Hagener, 2015), even in its chapter on cinematic treatments of acoustic space entitled, “Cinema as Ear”, makes no mention of the act of listening. The most influential exception in the realm of Film Studies is found in the work of Michel Chion. In Audiovision (1994), Chion delineated a trio of listening modes: “causal” (to determine information about the source of a sound), “semantic” (to decode meaning), and “reduced” (following Pierre Schaeffer, to focus on sonic traits irrespective of their cause or meaning). But Chion also thought the omnidirectionality of sound exceeded conscious attention which, for film, meant that the soundtrack could become “an insidious means of affective and semantic manipulation” (p. 34). Once again, the assumed passivity and vulnerability of the listener colors the analysis, although his term “audioviewing” did acknowledge the integration of sound and image, viewing, and listening. Elsewhere, the immersive, embodied relation to sound and its effects on “spectators” ­features prominently in film scholarship on sound, particularly in relation to the kinds of

190 Lacey “body genres” that come low down in the dominant hierarchies of taste, like horror movies, thrillers, fantasy, and melodramas. This approach can lead to a preference for the vocabulary of “hearing,” “overhearing,” “feeling,” or “haptic aurality,” over “listening” (Kassabian, 2001; Kozloff, 2000; Donaldson, 2017; Coulthard, 2012). In general, the scholarly attention to sound in film analysis thus centers on the supposed effects on (or readings by) the text’s implied listeners (Donnelly, 2005; Lerner, 2009). In other words, the focus is on the representation of sound, or how the cinematic apparatus listens on behalf of the audience. Sometimes, though, the aim of attending to the complexities of sound production (layering, mixing, orchestration, sonic dissolves, etc.) is to “build listening skills” among film viewers in the form of close listening (Buhler & Neumeyer, 2016). Strangely, it is in some ways easier to find the idea of the filmgoer as listener in scholarship about “silent” cinema. While people commonly talk about the “coming of sound” to the movies in the late 1920s, it is now clear there was always sound in movie houses, and audiences were always already listeners. In the absence of synchronized sound and image, films would be accompanied by music, sound effects, or in‐house narration (Altman, 2004). In contrast, ­television never had a “silent” period. Once tellingly described as “illustrated radio” (Chion, 1994, p. 157), it has long been accepted that television’s interruptible flow must appeal more to the ear than feature films (Altman, 1986). Nonetheless, references to listening are fleeting, though notable exceptions include studies about listening to music on TV (Deaville, 2011), or listening in relation to the changing technologies of television sound (Stadel, 2015), or the “decline of listening” in the historical and historiographical discourses of television’s early years (Lacey, 2016). Television continues to be treated predominantly as visual culture, with the soundtrack incidental, supplementary, separate, or subordinate to the visuals. It’s a slightly different story when it comes to gaming cultures, perhaps because the “­ audience” is more easily conceived of as “active”. Scholarship on gaming has certainly ­considered the affects and effects of sound and music for players. Rod Munday (2007), for example, categorized the use of music in video games as diegetic (supporting the game’s narrative), environmental (supporting the perception of the gaming world), and immersive (supporting the player’s involvement in the game by providing a three‐dimensional experience). In this context, the literature on sounds in gaming is caught up in the discourses of fidelity and verisimilitude that have featured in relation to sound technologies since the earliest days of phonography (Lacey, 2013). It is also reflected in the terminology of “virtual reality” technologies where binaural listening is a crucial part of the immersive experience (Collins, 2008; Droumeva, 2011; see also Miller, this volume).

Mediated Music and the Listening Subject If listening has been rather neglected in Media Studies as a whole, then the main exception has been in considerations of mediated music, which could take up an essay on its own. Mediated music goes well beyond recorded and broadcast music because, as Georgina Born (2010) has pointed out, there is, in fact, “no musical object or text…that stands outside of mediation…or prior to listening” (p. 88, my emphasis). Certainly, a ready‐made musicological language of listening can be imported into Media Studies, but the more potent reason for the plethora of studies is simply that music has tended to dominate the applications of sonic media, from the gramophone through radio to the Walkman, iPod, and streaming services (Bergh & DeNora, 2009). Listening to mediated music has become to all intents and purposes ubiquitous (Kassabian, 2013). These technologies of mediation in turn have their effects on music and its apprehension, and have been used by listeners to accompany and re‐order their subjective e­ xperience of space, time, and mobility. To take just two examples, individuals can use music technologies in their cars to create and navigate an “intoxicating



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mixture of noise while on the move” (Bull, 2004, p. 244), or turn to pirate or community radio to experience a degree of cultural autonomy through “collective intimacy and synchronous listening” (Mann, 2019, p. 383). Listening practices in relation to music especially, but other forms of audio too, are significant in the formation of individual subjectivity, collective identity, and forms of sociality. A common thread through the literature is the way in which listeners use sound media as tools to exercise forms of control, whether by marking out sonic territories of inclusion and exclusion (e.g. Bull, 2007; Vaillant, 2002; Oosterbaan, 2009; Gunner, Ligaga, & Moyo, 2012; Pham, 2013), or by marking out cultural distinctions, and therefore social hierarchies, of taste and expertise (e.g., Prior, 2011). The forms of control vary over time, not least in a dialectical relationship with the technical affordances and limitations of successive generations and iterations of sound technologies (e.g., Lacey, 2013; Nowak, 2016). Listeners’ mastery (there is a more or less explicitly gendered narrative at play in these discourses) of the technologies of playback, amplification, and immersion comes under particular scrutiny. In Jonathan Sterne’s (2003) words, listening has become “a site through which modern power relations can be elaborated, managed, and acted out” (p. 93). In an overview of contemporary listening practices across media forms, Jackie Cook (2011, pp. 59–60) suggested the soundscape displays a “polyrhythmic quality” requiring listeners in everyday life to inhabit and negotiate overlapping frames of mechanized time. This kind of insight is part of a longer tradition exploring the phenomenology of mediated listening, particularly the way dislocated sound can restructure the experience of space and time, with all that might mean at a personal and public level (Ihde, 1976; Berland, 1984; Scannell, 1996; see also Lipari, this volume). Again, the different affordances of changing technologies on bodily and sensory interaction with sounds feed into these discussions, such as the shifts from horns to headsets, loudspeakers to earphones, dials to screens, and so on (Hendy, 2010; Babich, 2014; Nyre, 2015; Gazi & Bonini, 2018). Any implicit narrative of progress or succession would, however, be problematic. Frances Dyson (2009) has helpfully described the sound of “new media” as “an accumulation of the auditive technologies of the past,” digitally re‐mixing the telepresence of the telephone, the inscription of the phonograph and tape recorder, the “ethereal aspirations” of radio, and the spatiality of film sound (p. 3).

Listening as Method Listening in Media Studies, as elsewhere, does not exclusively involve listening to sound – or indeed, its absence. There are various ways in which this plays out. One important strand is as a methodological device. Listening is clearly one of the techniques available to media researchers undertaking interviews, focus groups, ethnographies, and oral and archival histories. It is also a key component of textual analyses exploring the relations between form, content, and meaning. “Deep listening” is a concept imported from music and sound art (Oliveros, 2005), for example, while “close listening” (Bernstein, 1998) is a technique borrowed from a materialist critique of poetry as performance art that has come to be applied to various forms of sound and even visual media (Campt, 2017). On the other hand, with large‐scale data a­ nalytics developing in the digital humanities comes the prospect of “distant listening,” aggregating vast amounts of auditory data akin to Frank Moretti’s (2013) “distant reading.” Here, machine listening – in which datafication paradoxically involves the visualization of audio – becomes a surrogate for the human ear (see Macnamara, this volume). Conversely, sonification – as an alternative or complementary method to visualization techniques – offers ways of apprehending data by listening for changes in amplitude, temporal, spatial, or ­frequency resolution (Supper, 2015).

192 Lacey The concept of listening has also been gainfully mobilized as a metaphor to disrupt and rethink a field so dominated by the conventions and vocabularies of visual and literary culture. A leading social and cultural theorist in the field, Nick Couldry (2006), has argued that ­introducing listening as a critical category in itself might be a method to “listen out for connections” and address “the density of the contemporary, media‐saturated world [in a way] that does not look back to the stream of media images and signals, but instead listens out for wider patterns and disruptions” (p. 1). In an article that picks up on McLuhan’s characterization of  the electronic age as reviving the logics of the acoustic sphere, Kate Crawford (2009) ­persuasively argued that listening provides the appropriate metaphor for analyzing modes of online attention because it captures the permanent receptivity of people’s engagement with text‐based social media. It offers a more positive way of understanding this dominant form of interaction, otherwise too easily dismissed as “lurking”. Examining different categories and contexts of social media users, and finding many parallels between social media and radio, she proposed three modes of listening: background, reciprocal, and delegated. Background listening is that kind of habituated use of social media that maintains connection with the world without the need for focused attention; reciprocal listening occurs when so‐called leaders listen to their so‐called followers as well as vice versa, though this can quickly become delegated listening if the task of being seen to listen is outsourced. The term “social media listening” means something rather different in common parlance, however. It is a term used in marketing to describe the tracking, monitoring, measuring, and analyzing of online activity relevant to a particular brand or service (Schweidel & Moe, 2014). It also aspires to go beyond straightforward metrics to get at the moods and sentiments underlying online activity, to “hear” the voice of the consumer. It is preferred over “social media monitoring” by those who use it because it implies a responsive approach – algorithmically and in real time  –  to the interpretations it generates. Indeed, it goes beyond simple response, because the feedback mechanisms are modulated to manage, not just monitor populations. Social media listening is attractive to businesses and market researchers in general, as it claims to bypass the mediation of opinion polling by accessing opinions as they circulate in real time. The study of such tools might belong more squarely in the fields of Marketing and Public Relations than Media Studies, but it is a reminder that listening can also function as a surveillance device, and as such belongs in broader discussions about the use of media technologies in modern surveillance society. Where once acoustic surveillance was the province solely of the state, media technologies have by now normalized, aestheticized, and commodified the practices of eavesdropping and listening in (Crawford, 2012). Listening has become part of the everyday “participatory surveillance” culture of online social networking (Albrechtslund, 2008). What is more, the spread of voice‐activated media increasingly means that media technologies are now also listening to us (West, 2019).

The Politics and Ethics of Mediated Listening By contrast, the other principal way in which listening operates in the field of Media Studies as a category beyond the sonic, is as the rhetorical corollary to voice, or speech, particularly as it appears in questions of public and political communication (Annany, 2018; Couldry, 2006; Crawford, 2011; Lacey, 2013). In other words, in a field that has long addressed questions of political and cultural representation in terms of having a voice and being heard, recently more attention has been given to the rights, responsibilities, and responsiveness of listeners in that exchange. Listening, therefore, has been central to the “ethical turn” in media studies. In his work on alternative media, John Downing (2003) was among the first to make the case for a political ethics of listening to be at the heart of media research. Roger Silverstone (2007) later put the “obligation to listen” at the center of his influential exploration of media and morality.



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He argued for a reinvigoration of media literacy programs, a “secondary literacy” fit for the age of “secondary orality” (pp. 178–179). Others have questioned the residual notion of “literacy” in this context and argued for listening to be taken more seriously when thinking about new media literacies (Lacey, 2013, pp. 189–199; Macnamara, 2013). The ethics of listening has also been explored via concepts such as “earwitnessing” or listening as a “labor of care” in relation to memory work and media and social justice (Birdsall, 2009; Dreher & Mondal, 2018; Lloyd, 2009). Listening in these ways is approached as an expression of compassion, understanding, openness, or solidarity. Clearly these are ways of thinking about the role of listening in communication that are common to many contexts. The specific contribution of Media Studies is to ask questions about how these relations operate at a distance and through the institutionalized and technologized channels that constitute so much of our everyday experience.

Conclusion Given all these ways in which listening figures in relation to the media – as reception, consumption, and even production; as everyday habit and highly trained skill; as method, ethical practice, and political action – it is surprising what a low profile it has in the academic field of Media Studies. There is much more work to be done to understand its complexities. Listening is historically contingent, culturally specific, and fluid in relation to changing media technologies. It is a practice where power, identity, and control can be constructed and contested. It is a mode of perception that sits at the borderlines of cognition, affect, and embodiment. In a field so often blindsided by the visual, it can also intervene as a category of analysis to reframe and refocus established ways of thinking.

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12

Musicology Elvira Brattico and Niels Trusbak Haumann

Humans have a long history of making and listening to music. Archaeological evidence of music making and instruments date to the pre‐history of our homo sapiens and even Neanderthal ancestors (Wallin, Merker, & Brown, 2000, p. 235). Music, as an object of study and analysis, contributed to the emergence of musicology (from Greek “μουσική, mousike” meaning “music” and “λογία, logia” meaning “study of”). Musicology is a mature research field (~135 years old), tracing its initial conception to the Bohemian‐Austrian school of Guido Adler in 1884/1885. Like many disciplines, musicology has an array of subdisciplines or associated areas of study. As seen in Figure 12.1, musicology shares research areas with disciplines such as biology, sociology, psychology, and education. In this chapter, we introduce basic concepts, topics, and main findings in musicology research related to music listening. We leave aside historical musicology since the goal of the chapter is to inform the reader on the main concepts and findings related to everyday music listening, rather than to inform on the life and works of composers from the past. First, we introduce concepts of musical structure and form necessary for discussing music listening. Following this, we overview research into meanings and emotions music evokes in the listener, including aspects of music aesthetics, style, culture, and ethnomusicology. Finally, we introduce the cognitive neuroscience of music, an emerging discipline investigating the physiological underpinnings of music listening and music information technology related to computer‐ simulated music listening.

Explicit vs. Implicit Knowledge of Music In musicology, the act of listening is traditionally considered an analytical mode of information processing performed by listeners with training in music theory. This type of music listening means that sound details, organizations of musical structures (e.g., melodies, rhythms), and musical styles (set of musical conventions and features shared and adopted by composers of a specific culture or historical period) are explicitly defined, labeled, and classified. For example, composer and philosopher Leonard Meyer considered musical style as a complex system of probabilities helping to predict which tone and duration will occur next, dependent on preceding pitches and rhythms. Such a musical system can be recognized and explained mainly by The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Brattico and Haumann

Music Aesthetics (Philosophy) Music Psychology (Psychology/ Cognitive Sciences)

Sociology of Music (Sociology)

Musicology Music Pedagogy (Education Sciences) Music Technology (Physics and Information Technology)

Neuroscience of Music (Biology/ Neuroscience)

Figure 12.1  Sub‐disciplines of musicology and broader related disciplines.

practiced listeners (Meyer, 1957, p. 414). Following the development in the 1980s and 1990s of “new musicology,” championed by American critic and musicologist Joseph Kerman (1980) in the 1980s and 1990s, however, the central focus on analytical music listening and explicit knowledge of music was reconsidered. New Musicology signaled a shift to studying listeners’ social and subjective experiences and emotional reactions to music. With “implicit knowledge” of music (not acquired from formal training and not consciously accessible), listeners recognize, experience, and respond to musical structure, without a scientific vocabulary to verbally describe it. For example, Tillmann (2005) reported that listeners make systematic judgments on how well specific tones fit into a tonal context, even when the listener has no explicit knowledge of the concept of tonality in music. To use a nonmusical example, with implicit knowledge in relation to food, you might, for example, try a new dish at a restaurant without remembering its name or being able to explain its recipe, even though you can recognize and experience the dish (as different from other dishes). One notable difference is that in music listening, the listener’s experiences and emotional associations are typically linked to specific musical structures (Gabrielsson, 2009), which cannot be explicitly defined without having a music analytical vocabulary. For this reason, the analytical approach to listening, with description of the music structure, has remained central in defining and understanding music listening in musicological research.

Musical Features and Concepts Basically, when we listen to music, we hear organized sound intensities, pitches, timbres, and durations (see Figure  12.2; Table  12.1). On the intensity dimension, the human ear has a remarkable hearing range: from the ability to hear the weak sound of a mosquito approaching from a meter’s distance, to hearing the million‐times more intense sounds of a loud trumpet or ambulance siren (additional details are shown below in Table 12.1). In listening to European

Musicology 201

Figure 12.2  General concepts in musicology. Table 12.1  Basic sound dimensions in musicology. Concept

Quality

Music notation

Quantification

Intensity

Perceived as loudness. Dependent on the overall physical energy in the sound.

pp (pianissimo: softer), p (piano: soft), mp (mezzo‐ piano)/mf (mezzo‐forte), f (forte: loud), ff (fortissimo: louder).

Decibel (dB) sound pressure level (SPL) by reference to 20 micro Pascal (Pa). pp is ~30 dB or a whispering, mp/mf is ~60–65 dB or a normal conversation, ff is ~80 dB or maximum healthy loudness level.

Pitch

Heard as tone, or tone height. Dependent on the size and tension of the instrument or voice.

Letters C4, D4, E4, F4, G4, A4, B4 for characteristic tone degrees of increasing height. Below C4 is B3…, above B4 continues C5….

Fundamental frequency in Hertz (Hz). A typical female voice A is A3 = 220 Hz, which has higher pitch than a typical male voice A at A2 = 110 Hz.

Timbre

Experienced as difference in “tone color”, e.g. violins vs. trumpets. Dependent on the shape of the instrument or voice.

Defined by the name of the instrument to play, the playing technique, or the vowel or consonant to sing, or the singing technique.

Distribution of intensities (energies) in dB across the higher end of the human audible (20–20,000 Hz) frequencies (vibration speeds) in Hz.

Duration and Tempo

The perception of timing, pace, speed, or tempo.

Numbers counted, such as durations of ¾ or ¼, relative to a reference tempo, e.g. ¼ = 0.5 seconds (120 beats per minute).

Inter‐onset intervals (IOIs) between sounds, or breaks and sounds, in seconds, s. Typical range in music is 0.05–2 s. Tempo in beats per minute (bpm).

classical music concerts, for example, contrasting intensity levels is considered an important, inherent part of hearing expressions and mood states signaled by the music. In recorded popular music, however, intensity compression is often applied. This compression amplifies quieter sound details more than louder parts of the sound. Softening the dynamical contrasts makes it easier for listeners to hear the quieter details or sung lyrics. Thus, the specific use of intensity (in addition to other music dimensions) can be a defining factor of the musical style. Humans with optimal hearing can perceive the pitch of sound frequencies between 20 and 20 000 Hz. For example, a typical adult female voice at 165–255 Hz can be distinguished from a typical adult male voice at 85–180 Hz, partly because of their difference in pitch. To hear a pitch, the sound wave must be periodic (i.e., the wave must repeat). For example,

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Table 12.2  Main concepts in musicology. Level

Concept

Quality

Music notation

Musical structure

Melody

The sequential organization of pitches.

Notation of sequences of pitches.

Tonality

Configuration of tones in relation to a central pitch. “Coloring” (“chroma”) of the tonal scale.

Hundreds of named tonalities exist across styles and cultures, e.g., popular is the C‐major (white keys on a keyboard centered on C).

Harmony

Chords and sequences of chords, which are clusters of simultaneously sounded pitches.

There are several types of named chords and harmonic progressions. Their characteristics relate to principles of tonality.

Rhythm

The sequential organization of durations.

There is a high variety and possibilities of rhythms, often unique for the individual music piece.

Meter

The meter can be inferred by the listener by hearing repetitions of rhythmic structure.

There is a high variety and possibilities of named meters. Some basic examples are the March in 2/4, Waltz in 3/4, or the popular 4/4 meter.

Repetition

Use of repetition. Typically, a theme is repeated, and a chorus in songs.

Music structure that repeats is indicated by a letter, e.g. A, in a form: A‐A‐B‐A.

Variation

Use of variation or new musical structure, e.g., a fantasia, rhapsody or medley.

Music structure that varies is indicated by a number for the variation, e.g. A1‐A2, or a new letter for new musical structure, A‐B‐C…

Musical form

whispering as well as certain percussion instruments, such as bass drums, snare drums, and cymbals, create aperiodic sound waves, which do not have a unique pitch. The melody describes the sequential organization of the pitches (Table 12.2). Pitch plays key roles when we sing and play instruments for personal enjoyment and cultural and ritual ceremonies (e.g., songs for birthdays, weddings or funerals, or in national anthems). A melody can be recognized by listeners, even if it transposed to a higher or lower musical key (Thompson, 2013). Thereby, the pattern of pitch intervals of the melody is retained, even though the melodic pattern may be composed of a different range of pitches. Also, listeners typically form expectations on how a melody will continue after hearing its first few tones (Deutsch, 2013; Thompson, 2013). For example, listeners generally expect a continuation in the same pitch direction (upwards/ downwards) after hearing a couple of tone leaps in one direction. Moreover, a repeating pattern of tones in a melody will typically make listeners expect that the tones will repeat again. While the melody defines the sequential organization of the pitches, rhythm defines the sequential organization of the durations in the music. While the durations in rhythms are conventionally notated in idealized numerical ratios (see Table 12.1), there is an interest in investigating how played rhythms deviate from numerically idealized timing. Honing (2013) found that rhythms are perceived as categories, where some variance in timing is allowed before the listener begins hearing the rhythm as qualitatively different than the original one. Studies on expressive timing (Ashley, 2002; Honing & De Haas, 2008; Hudson, 1997) further call into consideration what the remaining variance in timing means. For instance, a rhythm played without any deviance from the ideal numerical ratios has a “mechanical” sound, while delayed timings have a “laid‐back” expression, and early timings appear as “rushed” (Honing, 2013).

Musicology 203 Apart from rhythm, regular pulses in music denote the meter of the music (Table 12.2). The meter can both be physically emphasized in the sounds in the music, but the meter is also partly mentally modeled by the listener by mentally fitting regular beats to the heard musical structure. For example, we actively infer a musical meter if we clap or move along regularly to music. So‐called syncopated rhythms are widely used in Afro‐American music genres and have been found important for listeners’ experiences of the pleasantness of rhythms (Witek, Clarke, Wallentin, Kringelbach, & Vuust, 2014). Typically, rhythms add regular subdivisions to the main beats of the meter (e.g., by counting 1‐and‐2‐and‐3‐and‐4‐and), because the rhythms have sound onsets on faster beats compared to the main beats. The syncopated rhythms have a clear sound onset on one (or more) of the added in‐between faster beats instead of on the following main beat, thus making it more challenging for the listener to follow, clap, or move along to the main beats of the meter. Finally, the timbre feature in music enables the listener to distinguish between different instruments (violins vs. violas), voices, and vowels (ē vs. ĕ), even when the pitch remains the same. Timbre is a concept that is less well known in other disciplines than musicology, and it may therefore be more difficult to approach. A main aspect of timbre is that it allows the listener to hear the physical shape‐related differences in an instrument or voice (more details are shown in Table 12.1). McAdams (2013) found that listeners are able to distinguish between timbres of instruments, if the instruments have different mechanisms of tone production, while timbre differences can also function as gestures signaling certain emotions and meanings.

Emotion and Meaning in Music The perception and induction of musical emotions, the interpretation of music, and how meaning is formed and attributed to music are all subjects of studies in disciplines ranging from psychology, semiotics, aesthetics, psychology, neuroscience, and biomusicology. Here, we briefly outline the main theoretical approaches related to music emotions and meaning attribution developed within each disciplinary framework.

Hermeneutic Approaches An interpretation of a music piece traditionally involves a hermeneutic circular analysis (Bent, 2001) (see also Dutta, this volume). Using this approach, researchers develop a theory designed to explain how the musical structures of the musical piece relate to each other across the hierarchical durational levels – from the smallest figure to the largest form of the music piece. As part of this process, hermeneutics scholars will include the biographical, historical, and cultural‐social or political context of the composer or musicians who created the music. As an example, in the classical Ring operas by Richard Wagner, a frequent selection of so‐called natural tone sequences (in the opening of the opera and in the theme of the main hero Siegfried), which are typical for older horn instruments, historically used for hunting, can be related to the heroic Norse mythology (e.g., worshipped by the Scandinavian Vikings), on which the operas are based, and which was particularly popular in the National Romantic European cultural/political historical period when the operas were composed.

Embodied Approaches Other approaches to interpreting music are inspired by embodied mind theory. These approaches attempt to identify specific musical sign systems by referring to similarities between the auditory music structure and cross‐modal physical and bodily properties (auditory, visual,

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tactile, sensory, and visceral) (also see Lipari, this volume). These approaches build upon the theory that, although the listening, seeing, and other senses come from inputs of separate sensory systems, the human brain integrates the experience of our immediate physical and social surroundings into a whole multisensory experience (Barsalou, 2008; Leman, 2008). For example, hearing a sound with decreasing intensity can be imagined as an object moving away from the listener, or hearing a sound with increasing intensity as an object approaching the listener (Clarke, 2001). Such an interpretation is based on our common experience with the regular behavior of sounds in physical environments. Theories on mirror‐neuron systems suggest that when we see someone performing an action (e.g., running, washing dishes), the same brain regions associated with performing that action get activated (Molnar‐Szakacs & Overy, 2006). As a result, we experience the act as if we personally performed it. In the case of music, the premotor cortex, which is involved in initiating actions, becomes activated when listening to sound (and seeing visual) stimuli, especially for musicians (Burunat et  al., 2015; D’Ausilio, Altenmüller, Olivetti Belardinelli, & Lotze, 2006; Molnar‐Szakacs & Overy, 2006). Molnar‐Szakacs and Overy (2006) further suggested that the premotor cortex and posterior inferior frontal gyrus (which is involved in observing and imitating actions), and the anterior insula (which links bodily sensations and emotional reactions) work together to form our conscious experience of observing actions and emotions. Thus, listening to music can involve imaginations of a musician’s actions and bodily gestures via the mirror‐neuron system. Iyer (2002) observed that bodily gestures can be imagined from listening to rhythms, depending on whether it is realistic to synchronize the type of bodily movement to the speed of the durations in the rhythm. For instance, rhythmic structure involving slower durations can be associated with breathing, while rhythms with gradually faster durations can be related to heartbeats, walking, or rapid hand gestures. Moreover, the symphony orchestra can imitate sounds of animals, weather conditions, or emphasize the emotions in song lyrics by drawing on common physical or situational social associations between hearing, seeing, and feeling (Zbikowski & Zbikowski, 2002). Pitch height can be heard as big/small objects by their relationships with the physical size of the instrument producing the pitch. Larger instruments such as a bass instrument produce lower pitches when compared to the smaller and higher‐ pitched piccolo flute. In contrast, listening to timbres is associated with hearing dull/sharp objects – sharper objects tend to resonate stronger at higher frequency ranges. Furthermore, predictability is well associated with the physical relaxation/tension of the human as a biological organism, by means of the degree of physical arousal attributed to predictable versus unpredictable and thus possibly biologically dangerous stimuli (e.g., the predictability of the sound material in regular tonal versus irregular atonal music).

Psychological Approaches Psychological approaches have gained recent popularity, often aimed at describing how shared concepts of emotions and moods are associated and communicated with music (see Imhof, this volume; Juslin & Västfjäll, 2008). The most applied categorization of musical emotions is based on the so‐called circumplex model, where emotions are sorted along the two dimensions of valence (negative vs. positive) and arousal (calm vs. arousing) (Vieillard et al., 2008). Some musical emotions do, however, involve more complex cognitive aspects that do not fit well into the simplified circumplex model. For instance, listeners can feel awed (a positive aesthetic emotion) by listening to music that induces emotions of sadness (a negative ­utilitarian emotion) (Brattico et al., 2016; Scherer, 2004). Research on the circumplex model has found that positive emotions can be induced by ­repetition and fulfilled expectations in music. The theory of mere exposure states that repeated

Musicology 205 exposure to a stimulus increases the positive valence in the perception of the stimulus, except if the continued repeated exposure reaches a stage of boredom, or satiation (Green, Baerentsen, Stodkilde‐Jorgensen, Roepstorff, & Vuust, 2012). For example, you might grow to like a song after hearing it multiple times, but at some point, there will be a desire for variation that can often only be filled by listening to other music. Brattico, Brattico, and Vuust (2017) proposed that a balance between repetitiveness and variance within musical structure is needed to make listeners feel that music is pleasant. In other words, a certain degree of rhythmic variance (though not too much) seems important for optimizing listeners’ enjoyment of grooves in popular dance music (Witek et al., 2014). Associations between music and emotions are also based on the theory of classical Pavlovian conditioning, where dogs through repeated co‐exposure learn to associate the sound of the walking steps of a person feeding them with subsequently eating food (Schultz & Schultz, 2015). Similarly, a so‐called leitmotif, motive, theme, or sound of a specific instrument, can be collectively associated with a person, place, emotion, or mood (Tagg & Clarida, 2003). Thus, the association made by listeners is based on repeatedly hearing music in albums, concerts, operas, or movies utilizing a specific system of musical associations. Emotional experiences of music can also depend on personally important encounters with specific music, or so‐called episodic memory. Examples of this type of association include couples who identify a particular song as “our song,” a mother and child who remember sharing a particular lullaby, or someone remembering a specific song playing upon receiving bad news. Listening to that specific music at a later time will then prompt the recall of that life episode and its related emotions. Psychological studies have found certain widely used associations between musical structure and emotional experiences (Balkwill, Thompson, & Matsunaga, 2004; Brattico, in press). Happiness or joy is often associated with relatively fast tempo, major tonalities, higher pitches, and lower melodic and rhythmic complexity. In contrast, sadness is often associated with slow tempo, minor tonalities, low pitches, and higher melodic and rhythmic complexity. Music associated with peaceful emotions often have more dark or dull timbres, while music expressing anger is typically expressed by brighter or sharper timbres and higher rhythmic complexity. Empirical psychological research, however, has also found that the emotion and meaning of music is a subjective concept dependent on individual experiences, memories, and interpretations. Several studies have found that pleasant moments in music that elicit frisson or aesthetic chill sensations (i.e., goosebumps, shivers) are often specific to the individual listener (Blood & Zatorre, 2001; Grewe, Nagel, Kopiez, & Altenmüller, 2007; Nusbaum et al., 2014).

Music Aesthetics and Ethnomusicological Research While music psychology mainly investigates listeners’ emotional experiences, music aesthetics addresses the attribution of positive value to music and the formation of musical taste in historical epochs (Brattico, 2019). Musical aesthetic is based on the listener’s assessment of the music’s ability to follow structural principles, such as rules for voice‐leading (melodic structure), meter, tonality, and harmony, and the well‐formedness of the music piece (e.g., that it follows the sonata form or the form of a song with verses composed around a repeated chorus). At the same time, tension or originality makes music distinctive. In Western music history, there has been a tradition of defining an aesthetic of the “ugly” (Hohendahl, 2005). Some composers or musicians intentionally pursued this aesthetic to create new music styles (e.g., avant‐garde music) which, over historical time periods, gradually changed listeners’ reception of what is considered “good taste” (Mencke, Omigie, Wald‐Fuhrmann, & Brattico, 2019). For example, the diminished minor chord was relatively rare and considered obscure before it became part of mainstream Romantic classical music of the 1800s and in modern jazz music. The introduction of the hemiola rhythms by Beethoven, as well as the swing rhythms and

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electric amplifications and distortions of guitars in Rock ‘N’ Roll music, were also originally considered provocative before they became incorporated as part of mainstream popular music. In other extreme cases, modern orchestral pieces such as The Rite of Spring by European composer Igor Stravinsky resulted in riots and people leaving the first performance. Symphony No. 4, introduced by American composer Charles Ives (circa 1924), had its first complete performance postponed for several decades until it became more attractive in 1965. Such intergenerational social changes in music taste are difficult to investigate empirically, although they can be traced in music reception studies (Samson, 2001). From a narrower perspective of families, one study (Ter Bogt, Delsing, Van Zalk, Christenson, & Meeus, 2011) found that preference for broader musical genres (pop, rock, classical) was to a large extent culturally inherited from one generation of listeners to the next. Apart from differences in music taste across historical epochs, the groups performing and listening, and the culture in which the music is situated, also varies with the geographical location. In the ethnomusicological approach, researchers collect and analyze music and interpretations of music within and across cultures (Rice, Porter, & Goertzen, 2017). This approach reveals similarities in music, uncovers how music structural traits have been borrowed and used across cultures (e.g., in cross‐over genres and World Music), and demonstrates how music unites performers and listeners (Morrison & Demorest, 2009). For example, melodies are often organized in tonal structures spanning five to seven different types of tones, and rhythms can often be counted in numerical relationships, which make it relatively easy for any listener to follow the basic musical structure across different cultures (Trehub, 2015). Apart from the basic sound dimensions, however, the musical structure across style and culture is diverse. The uniqueness of music to specific cultures or generations is important to defining and distinguishing the personal and/or social identities associated with specific music, such as that of a certain composer or performer, a nation, a generation, or a decade (Bennett, 2000; Vuoskoski, Clarke, & DeNora, 2017). For example, the widely used Arabic maqam scales and the Indian raga scales are unique for their frequent use of relatively small micro‐tone intervals in the melodies, whereas large tone leaps are characteristic of the yodel styles in certain European and American music. In contrast, atonal music, widely used in, for example, modern composition music and horror film scores, lacks any tonality for the listener to follow (Mencke et al., 2019). With respect to rhythmic and metric structure, Afro‐Cuban, Central‐ and South‐American, and Sub‐Saharan African dance music widely uses simultaneously played contrasting rhythmic structures (­polyrhythms), while Arabic, Indian, and other South Asian music have meters with varying durational relationships (additive meter), which are more challenging to count and follow for the listener (Haumann, Vuust, Bertelsen, & Garza‐Villarreal, 2018). Ethnomusicological studies over the last decade have pitted biological/physical positivist approaches against that of social constructivists (Morrison & Demorest, 2009). Physical positivists argue that music aesthetics, meanings, and emotions originate in shared, generalizable, universal, embodied principles across the human species, whereas social constructivist theorists argue that music aesthetics, meanings, and emotions are arbitrary, created by a group of music performers and listeners (Demorest & Morrison 2016; McDermott, Schultz, Undurraga, & Godoy, 2016). The ethical dilemma in this debate is that a researcher can predict music interpretations and emotional reactions but only of the average listener (Haumann, 2015). Burnett (2002) noted that in some cases generalizations of music and listeners might (unintendedly) exhibit a cultural imperialism by repeating and habituating the listener to the most frequently heard music genres and interpretations, even when the listener’s musical preferences and interpretations may initially diverge from that of the average listener. This ethical dilemma has previously been addressed with regards to music mass media (Burnett, 2002), while an ongoing discussion focuses on cultural biases in the design of music information technology systems and how to reduce this bias (also see the section about Music Information Retrieval (MIR)) (Cornelis, Lesaffre, Moelants, & Leman, 2010). The opposing nature vs. nurture theories are difficult to

Musicology 207 test empirically, mainly because of the inherent complexities of investigating infants’ aesthetical preferences before their extensive exposure to stimuli of different social environments and because communication technology has increased exposure to music across cultures. Research into music preferences, however, reports a number of interesting and relevant findings. For example, while research suggests that rhythmic structure in music often can be decomposed into simple ratios of 1:2 and 2:3 (Trehub, 2015), listeners from Turkish and Arabic cultures typically prefer more complex ratios involving higher numbers (Soley & Hannon, 2010). Newborn infants do not seem to show any rhythmical or metrical preferences, but can be taught aesthetic preferences (Phillips‐Silver & Trainor, 2005). This finding is in keeping with the “open‐earedness” hypothesis, which assumes that children are initially open to music of different forms, whereas aging listeners develop more specific preferences (Hargreaves & Bonneville‐Roussy, 2018; see also Altvater‐Mackensen, this volume). In relation to tonality, studies suggest that infants better distinguish between tones with simpler pitch frequency ratios (e.g. 3:2) than tones with more complex pitch ratios (e.g. 45:32) (Schellenberg & Trehub, 1996). Also, Fritz et al. (2009) observed that the culturally isolated Mafa listeners in Cameroon in Africa, like many Western music listeners, prefer melodies with simpler pitch interval ratios (e.g. 3:2) over melodies with more complex higher number pitch interval ratios (e.g. 10:9). The culturally isolated Tsimane listeners in the Amazonas of Bolivia in South America do however appear to have a different aesthetic system (McDermott et al. 2016). They seem to prefer larger pitch intervals, but display no preferences for small pitch ratios (despite their ability to hear the differences between gradually smaller and larger pitch ratios). Therefore, while there is broad agreement of general principles for describing the basic sound units in music, it is necessary to be aware of the subjective, historical, and cultural biases of the listener with respect to the structure, form, and interpretation of the music.

Cognitive Neuroscience of Music Another recent approach related to music listening is cognitive neuroscience of music (Thaut & Hodges, 2019), which combines approaches from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and musicology. The discipline uses the neuroimaging methods of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission topography (PET), and functional near‐infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS); the electromagnetic neurophysiological measures of electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG); and the non‐invasive disturbance of electrical neurotransmission processes with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) (Neuhaus, 2017; see also Teubner‐Rhodes & Kuchinsky, this volume). These methods are applied to conduct research on the brain structures and functions involved in music performance and music listening. The goal of this highly interdisciplinary approach is both to increase knowledge on the general structure and functioning of the human brain and the neurobiological foundations of music, as well as to advance knowledge on hearing and movement disorders, cognitive and emotional impairments and psychiatric disorders related to physiological and functional changes in the brain and peripheral nervous system based on clinical research.

Neuroscience of Music Perception

Current research, mainly on human patients and other mammals, has investigated the peripheral physiology of hearing and shown that mechanical sound waves are converted into bioelectrical responses in the auditory nerve fibers of the inner ear (see Hurley, this volume). Around 1/1000 of a second after the sound wave reaches the ear of the listener, the responses of the nerve fibers are transmitted upwards along pathways in the brainstem and thalamus, reaching the cortex (the walnut‐shaped surface expanding most of the human brain) in approximately 1/100 of a second

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(Brattico, Bogert, & Jacobsen, 2013). It is uncertain how long it takes a listener to experience the sound consciously, but bioelectrical responses in the cortex occurring more than 1/5 of a second after the sound reaches the ear are more affected by whether the listener is actively paying attention to sounds (instead of focusing elsewhere, such as on visual experiences) than bioelectrical responses occurring earlier. The first part of the cortex receiving sound inputs, the so‐called primary auditory cortex, roughly located upwards behind the ears, is mainly involved in the hearing of the basic sound dimensions in music: these are the intensity, pitch, duration, and timbre (Peretz & Zatorre, 2005). Listening to melodies and rhythms activates brain regions extending out in neighboring areas of the cortex around the primary auditory cortex (Koelsch, 2012). Furthermore, hearing more complex aspects of music related to tonality, harmony, and meter, activates neural pathways via the so‐called arcuate fasciculus (a white‐matter tract) connecting the superior temporal gyrus with the inferior frontal gyrus of the brain (the last region roughly located upwards behind the eyes) (Peretz, 2016).

Neuroscience of Music Learning

While the brain regions and pathways related to music listening remain relatively organized, changes in the activity, size of the brain regions, and strengths of brain connectivity underlying music listening occurs during one’s lifespan as an effect of learning through music listening (Morrison & Demorest, 2009; Reybrouck, Vuust, & Brattico, 2018b; Zatorre, 2013). A main approach for investigating functional brain changes across the lifespan is to measure cortical electrical activity related to the listener’s ability to hear changes in the basic sound dimensions in music. This approach has been used to explore the ability of children and adult brains to functionally distinguish between musical sounds (Kraus & White‐Schwoch, 2017; Vuust et al., 2011) as well as how the cortex of the brain responds differently to culture‐specific melodic (Morrison & Demorest, 2009) and rhythmic/metric structure (Haumann, Vuust, et al., 2018). This research suggests that brain changes are dependent on the music listening biography of the individual (Merrett, Peretz, & Wilson, 2013; Miendlarzewska & Trost, 2014). For instance, listeners of culturally unfamiliar melodies often experience higher activation in the right inferior frontal regions of the brain than those who listen to more culturally familiar melodies (Morrison & Demorest, 2009).

Neuroscience of Music Performance

Composing music or playing a musical instrument also affects the structural and functional state of the brain. For example, imagining music while composing a new melody appears to activate some of the same brain regions that are activated when listening to music (Zatorre & Halpern, 2005). When professionally trained musicians listen to music or sound stimuli, their brains typically show stronger neural activity than non‐musicians (Kraus & Chandrasekaran, 2010). Music training appears to be related to the growth of cortical tissue and pathways between the basic auditory and frontal regions, and increased connectivity of the corpus callosum connecting the two brain hemispheres (Burunat et al., 2015; Pantev & Herholz, 2011). Related research by Lahav, Saltzman, and Schlaug (2007) found that listeners with no prior music playing experience who passively listened to melodies they just learned to play on a piano experienced increased brain activity in regions involved in actively playing the piano (e.g., in the intra‐parietal sulcus, Broca’s area, pre‐motor and motor cortex). Notably, this increased activity does not occur when these same listeners are exposed to melodies they have not learned to play.

Neuroscience of Music Emotions

Similarly, dopamine‐related brain regions are activated when listening to musical structure that one finds particularly pleasant (Blood & Zatorre, 2001; Reybrouck, Vuust, & Brattico, 2018a). Apart from the more direct pleasure responses that can be experienced by listening to musical

Musicology 209 sounds and structures, a more thoughtful admiration of the way the musical structure is composed can create an experience of beauty (Salimpoor & Zatorre, 2013). These two positive listening experiences have been found to involve separate brain regions: Musical pleasure seems to activate lower regions in the frontal brain, while hearing music as beautiful appears to activate higher frontal brain areas (Brattico, 2019; Ticini, 2017). Moreover, the experience of emotions associated with certain music (such as happiness or sadness) is in terms of brain mechanisms distinct from the mere enjoyment of the music (Brattico et al., 2016).

Clinical Applications of Music Neuroscience

Cognitive neuroscience of music studies with clinical populations are increasing in number and impact (Särkämö, Tervaniemi, & Huotilainen, 2013; Thaut, McIntosh, & Hoemberg, 2015), both in relation to diagnostics and therapy. Current clinical tests in patients with hearing disorders reveal the presence or absence of brain responses, suggesting normal or abnormal hearing (see, for example, Carter, Golding, Dillon, & Seymour, 2010). For instance, experimental procedures for testing brain responses to music can be adapted and utilized as objective diagnostic tools to investigate a patient’s ability to distinguish between the finer details along sound dimensions and aid in diagnostic choices (e.g., hearing aids or cochlear implants) (Näätänen, Petersen, Torppa, Lonka, & Vuust, 2017; see also Hurley, this volume). Another general clinical research approach considers whether the attractive, positive aspects that make many people listen to and appreciate music can have positive effects on certain groups of patients. Patel (2012) described the “OPERA” hypothesis that emerged from this approach: O: Overlap references the idea that training in certain musical skills may positively impact other skills centered in overlapping brain regions (e.g., language skills in stroke patients, ­reactivation of memory traces in dementia or Alzheimer’s associated with music). P: Precision, such as that found in the precise rhythm and meter in music, can aid in neurological diseases and related illnesses (e.g., Parkinson’s patients can move more precisely by ­synchronizing their movements with music). E: Emotion is revealed in the ability of music to enhance or regulate the mood of the listener (e.g., in mood‐related disorders such as depression). R: Repetitiveness in music aids in patient rehearsal (e.g., changing or reinforcing behaviors). A: Attention aids patients who need to reorient their focus towards more pleasant experiences (e.g., patients with chronic pain).

Music Information Retrieval and Naturalistic Music Neuroscience

Recently, music information retrieval (MIR) analyses have proven useful in music neuroscience (Brattico et al., 2017). The MIR approach is based on the use of computer‐algorithms and computational models in order to automatically extract music structures, forms, and emotional associations from audio recordings (Table 12.3) and to categorize music into styles and genres. Drawing from a database with millions of music pieces, MIR helps listeners discover music that is new but similar to previously heard music, find music of a certain genre, or locate music that expresses a certain mood (Schedl, Gómez, & Urbano, 2014). Today, MIR‐based research is utilized by online music streaming services with specific acoustical and musical features being extracted and analyzed, attempting to computationally imitate how a listener hears the music. While attempts have been made to automatically identify repeating and novel structure in music audio recordings (Haumann, Kliuchko, Vuust, & Brattico, 2018), current MIR research faces several problems, including overcoming complexities in imitating human perception of music, analyzing musical structure extending across more seconds (e.g., melodies, rhythms), processing of single voices to multiple simultaneous voices, and achieving reliable associations of music structure with emotions – all while taking into account the aspects of historical and

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Table 12.3  MIR features, their related musical concepts and calculations. MIR feature

Concept

Calculation

RMS loudness

Intensity

Root‐mean squared (RMS) intensity in dB across a short time window, e.g., 50 ms.

Spectral centroid, brightness

Timbre

Spectral envelopes are commonly calculated by applying the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), e.g., the spectral centroid shows the geometric center on the spectral envelope. Brightness measures the ratio of energy above vs. below, e.g. 1500 Hz.

Chromagram

Pitch

Based on the spectral envelope, sound intensities of octave equivalent pitch classes are extracted.

Mode, Key clarity

Tonality

The strength, or clarity, of a specific tonality (mainly Western major or minor tonality) is estimated, by correlating the chromagram with chromagram‐profiles for each tonality and finding the best match.

Onset

Duration

Musical note durations can be derived by subtracting peak sound intensity inter‐onset‐intervals (IOIs), derived from the measured sound waveform.

Tempo, Pulse clarity

Tempo

Tempo can be estimated, e.g., by means of finding the optimal time span for autocorrelation (self‐similarity) of segments on the intensity curve. Pulse clarity can be derived as the optimal strength of the autocorrelation.

cultural differences of listening (Cornelis et al., 2010). Nevertheless, the application of MIR to brain signal processing represents progress for music neuroscience. Typically, brain responses have been studied by focusing on controlled synthesized music features in the effort to determine which music feature or detail causes which specific brain response (see, for example, Tervaniemi, Rytkonen, Schroger, Ilmoniemi, & Näätänen, 2001; Vuust et al., 2011). Researchers have recently begun questioning to what extent the brain responses to synthetic sound stimuli inform our understanding of the neural mechanisms behind music listening (Alluri et al., 2012). In the past, brain responses to real music pieces due to their acoustical complexity have been inaccessible for systematic investigation. Following the new approach, researchers determined that listening to recorded music pieces results in similar brain responses as when listening to synthetic music stimuli (Alluri et al., 2012; Burunat et al., 2016; Haumann, Kliuchko, et al., 2018; Poikonen et al., 2016). For example, Alluri et al. (2012) and Burunat et al. (2016) found by applying MIR and fMRI methods that brighter compared to duller timbres in recorded music were correlated with increased activity in primary and secondary auditory brain regions, which is consistent with previous findings using synthetic stimuli. However, parts of the recorded music containing unclear vs. clear tonality and meter did not consistently relate to increased activity in the frontal regions, as previously observed using synthetic stimuli, but did in some listeners relate to increased activation of limbic structures involved in emotion processing (Alluri et  al., 2012; Burunat et  al., 2016). In line with previous findings based on synthetic stimuli, Poikonen et al. (2016) and Haumann, Kliuchko, et al. (2018) found with MIR, EEG, and MEG methods that salient changes in intensity, pitch, and timbre in recorded music are related to rapid cortical (P1‐N1‐P2) brain responses occurring after 50–250 ms. In addition, Haumann, Kliuchko, et al. (2018) found cases of an unexpected loudness increase and a rare chord, which was followed by cortical responses (N1, MMN, or EAN) known to indicate violation of listeners’ expectations. Moreover, the new approach also has the potential of using mobile EEG technology to study music listening outside the laboratory. Thus, while cognitive neuroscience of music has uncovered basic brain regions, pathways, and functions involved in music listening, future work using the naturalistic approach needs to address ecological validity of the findings.

Musicology 211

Conclusion This chapter introduced the vast field of humanistic and scientific research on music listening, described under the broad umbrella term “musicology” and aimed at defining how we perceive, understand, and appreciate music on a daily basis. We explained the basic sound units in music (intensity, pitch, timbre, and duration), reviewed the structuring of pitches into melodies, tonalities, and harmonies, and the structuring of durations into rhythms and meters. We also discussed how listeners assign emotions and meanings to these music structures. From the approach of ethnomusicology, we emphasized the role of enculturation and social learning processes to musical preferences. Finally, we mentioned how music listening is studied according to the more recent approaches of cognitive neuroscience of music, searching for the neural underpinnings of music listening, and MIR, investigating computer‐simulated music listening. As demonstrated in this chapter, musicology studies a classical art form of structuring sound – which partly shows recurrent themes of defining musical structures, meanings, and interpretations, and which partly adapts to the continuous historical, cultural, and technological changes in the way music is applied. Ongoing interdisciplinary trends (mentioned in this chapter and the likely source of future developments), include the combination of musicology with modern music technology (based on MIR research), the application of musicology with clinical audiology (for diagnosing, prognosing, and treating hearing disorders), as well as psychological and neurological disorders (based on music physics, music psychology, and music neuroscience).

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13

Philosophy Deborah S. Mower

Although the concept of listening is not actively addressed or discussed within the discipline of philosophy, the entire discipline seeks to cultivate listening as a component part of how human agents engage with others and gain knowledge.1 The Greek word “philosophy” is best translated as “the love of wisdom or knowledge.” There are three main branches of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Metaphysics, the study of what exists and its nature includes individual entities, interactions, and complex systems. Originally termed “natural philosophy,” this branch has expanded into all the areas of what today is known as science.2 Epistemology is the study of knowledge: the conditions of when knowledge is attainable; criteria for knowledge versus belief, opinion, and conviction; and the progress of knowledge and its relation to truth. The third branch, ethics, focuses on a range of issues: exploration of the nature of the good and questions of value, examination of normative frameworks that guide individual decision‐making and the structure and function of social and political institutions, and analysis and resolution of particular problems through the application of normative frameworks. While the concept of listening has not been a primary construct within the discipline of philosophy, this does not mean that its crucial role in the function and development of the discipline is not understood. In the first section of this chapter, I detail the focus of the discipline and how that focus has shaped the concept of knowledge, and the role and concept of listening within the discipline. In the remainder of the chapter, I explore how listening functions within the philosophical domains of reasoning, understanding, and intellectual virtue, noting implications for the notion of listening and possible avenues for future research within each domain.

I owe sincere thanks to Steven Skultety for thought‐provoking conversations during the development of this chapter, in which he both listened and offered superb advice. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the editors, Debra Worthington and Graham Bodie, for their direction in developing this chapter. 2 For some interesting historical reasons, the Latin word “scientia” – which is best translated as “the study of knowledge” – replaced the Greek terminology as the label for the study of the natural world and hard sciences. 1

The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

218 Mower

Knowledge, Activity, and the Conception of Listening To understand the role of listening within philosophy, it is first necessary to examine the conception of knowledge. In his Seventh Letter (1966), Plato discussed the role of texts and their relation to knowledge. In explaining why he had not written a large number of treatises (and taking to task others who claimed to produce authoritative texts), Plato presented a conception of knowledge as an active rather than a passive process. He first detailed the five steps or components of knowledge: First of these comes the name; secondly the definition; thirdly the image…. Fourth comes knowledge and intelligence and true opinion regarding these objects; and these we must assume to form a single whole, which does not exist in vocal utterance or in bodily forms but in souls…. Moreover, these four attempt to express the quality of each object no less than its real essence….We compel a man to give the Fifth as his answer and to explain it… [which] makes the person who is expounding his view by speech or writing or answers appear to most of his hearers to be wholly ignorant of the subjects about which he is attempting to write or speak; for they are ignorant sometimes of the fact that it is not the soul of the writer or speaker that is being convicted but the nature of each of the Four, which is essentially defective.

He then explained that knowledge is not the simplistic output of following these steps linearly. The very complexity of the quality of an object, our grasp of its essence, the relation between our understanding of its quality (appearance) and essence, and our ability to offer an explanation is a matter of degree – subject to error, mistakes, increased access to information, and increased reflection. He continued, noting, It is the methodical study [343e] of all these stages, passing in turn from one to another, up and down, which with difficulty implants knowledge… In one word, neither receptivity nor memory will ever produce knowledge in him who has no affinity with the object…. And this is the reason why every serious man in dealing with really serious subjects carefully avoids writing, lest thereby he may possibly cast them as a prey to the envy and stupidity of the public. In one word, then, our conclusion must be that whenever one sees a man’s written compositions – whether they be the laws of a legislator or anything else in any other form – these are not his most serious works.

What is so interesting about this very early text – and the tone that it has set for the discipline ever since – is that Plato was addressing the importance of analysis as a continual activity. For Plato, true knowledge does not arise from the production or consumption of texts, but from the active and constant examination of subjects. Knowledge is not the production of a report, monograph, or treatise, and one does not gain knowledge through reading such things – at best, they are snapshots of current beliefs recorded and frozen in time, inherently incomplete and thereby inaccurate. While we might want to take Plato’s cautions on texts with a grain of salt, the point is well taken that passive absorption of information is of a different kind than the understanding gained through active study and the continual expansion of beliefs gained through constant analysis. It is this conception of knowledge that is exemplified in the very definition of “philosophy” – the love of knowledge or wisdom. The conception of knowledge as a continual expansion of beliefs illuminates the role of listening within philosophy. For Plato, knowledge is not found in transmission from the informed to the uninformed, whether it is transmitted via text or speech. Understanding text and speech involves reading and listening, but these actions – in themselves – do not qualify as the type of activity that Plato seeks. Reading and listening, admittedly, are actions involving a wide range of behaviors and cognitive processing. However, actions and activities can be distinguished by whether they are (i) continuing; (ii) organized or coordinated via a goal; and (iii) purposive for improvement.

Philosophy 219 For the distinction between an action and an activity, consider the following example. Suppose I swing a tennis racket through the air: It involves a specific behavior (the motion of my arm) and cognitive processing (proprioception, vision, etc.) to keep the racket at a particular trajectory and speed. Although one might think I was a lunatic, I could engage in this action throughout the day: while teaching classes, shopping at the grocery store, or making dinner for the family. While this action meets the first condition – something which continues – it does not continue in an organized or coordinated fashion. Suppose instead that my goal was to become a better tennis player. In such a case, my continuing actions of swinging the racket are organized, whether they are in response to balls flying out of a practice machine or done while making dinner (although not advisable with a knife in hand). While there are many repeated actions that may be coordinated by a goal, not all actions are productive in attaining that goal. Swinging a knife along with a racket while making dinner meets the first two conditions (continuing, goal‐oriented), but these actions are unlikely to help me with the third condition (purposive for improvement). In fact, such actions will fail to make me a better tennis player (and introduce serious harms in other ways). In contrast, swinging a racket to hit balls shot from a practice machine is purposive in that it will help me to meet my goal of being a better tennis player. Actions that meet all three conditions are ­activities, and activities are marked by improvement and the development of a skill. Consequently, this discussion provides us with six lessons for how to think about the concept of listening within philosophy: 1. Listening conceived as the passive receipt of information has no role within philosophy. Listening conceived as an activity has a clear connection. 2. The notion of an activity provides us with criteria to identify listening as something more than the passive intake of information or the cognitive processing of sound. 3. Given the disciplinary emphasis on knowledge acquisition and expansion, the activity of listening must serve the epistemic goal of advancing knowledge. 4. Because listening is an epistemic activity, it is inherently cognitive. 5. Because listening is an activity, it is an improvable skill. 6. As a cognitive and epistemic activity, listening does not require interaction with other agents or sound – although both are common. Listening does not require an interlocutor, for it can occur in non‐interpersonal contexts such as attending a public lecture. Further, much philosophical work is carried out; much like it is in the theoretical work of all disciplines, in the solitary labor of individual scholars. We sometimes weigh ideas, consider evidence, consider counterexamples and objections, imagine scenarios, and project outcomes. Although other individuals typically provide the material to which we listen in interpersonal interactions, we can engage in the same activity of listening through the use of inner speech which underscores that hearing is not equivalent to listening. Now that we have clarified the concept of listening as it appears within philosophy, we can examine how listening functions inside the domains of reasoning, understanding, and intellectual virtue.

Listening and Reasoning Given the definition of listening established above, we can now examine how the activity of listening functions within the domain of reasoning. To gain some insight, consider the example of a conversation between two parties, Sarah and Bill. What exactly are they doing when listening? In assuming that the other is a rational agent and interacting with him/her as such, each is engaged in the activity of identifying and classifying various types of information

220 Mower gleaned from speech such as normativity, evidentiary status, relational patterns, and occurrency. We examine each of these in turn.

Normativity Normative claims involve statements that express value, preferences, or principles as well as statements that contain normative concepts such as justice, the good, care, and loyalty. In listening to Bill, Sarah must identify whether Bill is directly or indirectly providing normative information, and she must classify the information accordingly (e.g., a value vs. a concept). Due to the connotation of various words within our language, claims that are highly normative can often be cast as purely empirical. If one describes some action as being a murder – which is cross‐culturally considered to be immoral or a grave evil – the claim appears to be a straightforward description, yet it automatically provides a normative evaluation of the event in the very presentation of the claim. For example, Bill might state that abortion doctors murdered 6314 unborn children in 2018. On the face of it, such a claim appears to be purely non‐normative and empirical given that it presents relevant agents, a number, and a year. Note, however, that the description of abortion as murder introduces a normative component to the claim, in that it presumes that the ending of life for unborn children is categorized as murder and thus is immoral or wrong. Bill could make the same statement using slightly different language, such as the claim that abortion doctors ended the lives of 6314 unborn children in 2018. Similarly, he could claim that abortion doctors terminated 6314 pregnancies in 2018, or alternatively that abortion doctors respected the reproductive choices of 6314 women in 2018. Although each one of these claims may be presented as non‐normative, they indirectly provide normative information to which Sarah must attend. So in listening, Sarah must attend to the normativity of information: whether it is normative or non‐normative, and if normative, whether it is directly or indirectly presented.

Evidentiary Status Evidentiary claims involve statements that express either factual or non‐factual information. In listening to Sarah, Bill must identify whether the information she presents is evidence or opinion as well as whether it is either reliable or true in either category. Although one might assume that factual information would be easy to identify, opinions are often presented as factual information, and information that may be factual in nature can be false or unreliable. For example, Sarah might state that Latinx immigration poses a high risk to American national security. Although this statement appears to be factual, it is merely Sarah’s opinion that immigration by Latinxs (as opposed to other demographic groups) should be classified as a national security risk (rather than as a humanitarian policy decision or an economic labor supply adjustment) and that such immigration is a high risk (rather than a medium to low risk, based on the type of risk). In contrast to stating an opinion (as non‐factual information), Sarah could present factual information such as various statistics, total numbers of immigrants, percentages of adults versus children, or details from reports by governmental agencies. And of course, Sarah might state that 76% of Latinx immigrants are drug traffickers, but this information is false. Because a listener must separate and filter evidentiary information from the linguistic packaging in which it appears, evidentiary information is perhaps the most difficult to classify and provides the best illustration of the inherently cognitive and interpretive nature of listening.

Relational Patterns The activity of listening not only involves attending to normativity and evidentiary status but also the identification of relations between statements and the classification of those relational

Philosophy 221 patterns. Arguments are never single statements, but involve multiple statements spread over time, containing linked information and providing support for other statements. A listener attends to information both presented directly in statements as well as that presented indirectly in how the statements are linked. Consider the following classic example often used in introductory philosophy classes. Bill might state that “all rivers have banks” (premise one), “all banks have money” (premise two), so consequently, that “all rivers have money” (conclusion).3 Despite the truth of each of the premises, the conclusion is, quite obviously, false. The premises only appear to relate because we made use of more than one meaning of the term “banks.” (In premise one, we can represent the meaning of the term “banks” with a lowercase “b,” and we can represent the meaning of the term “banks” in premise two with an uppercase “B.”) In listening to Bill, Sarah must not only identify the pattern between the statements but also classify whether the pattern either relates the statements or fails to do so. (Notice that a valid argument succeeds in establishing the link between statements, which we can represent as a simple linked chain of symbols: A = B, and B = C, therefore A = C. Unfortunately, the above argument does not relate the statements: A = b, and B = C, so A and C are unlinked because b and B are not equivalent.) In listening, Sarah is attending to the logical structure between statements, evidentiary status as support for conclusions, consistency between the use and meaning of terms, and consistency in the presentation and use of individual statements. Given this analysis, it is now quite clear that the activity of listening involves identifying and classifying information at both the basic and meta‐level.

Occurrency Even more interestingly, the activity of listening involves attending to occurrency: whether basic level information is presented (or absent) and whether a premise is stated or unstated. For example, Sarah may state that the current unemployment rate is low (below 4%) and conclude that America must have a wall on the border with Mexico. Bill identifies the conclusion and classifies the statement of the employment rate as an evidentiary and factual claim, yet also identifies the absence of any evidence or premises that directly support Sarah’s conclusion. Sarah has left a premise in her argument unstated: The failure to create a wall would have a negative effect on the low unemployment rate by increasing the overall rate of unemployment in America. Normative claims provide a wonderful example of unstated premises or unstated claims within arguments. Individuals are often unaware that their conclusion depends on an unstated (non‐ occurrent) normative claim, or perhaps assume that the other party shares a similar normative view. Sarah may present a variety of evidentiary claims, but never state why she thinks current American citizens have a higher status or priority in policy making than others. Notice that her arguments could depend on a wide variety of normative statements: care for her own group (resources and benefits), allegiance or loyalty to individuals with a particular political designation (American citizens) or shared history (as Americans), or respect for current American immigration policy (law and procedural requirements). In listening to her argument, Bill must identify that a normative premise is absent and classify the non‐­occurrent premise based on other details gleaned from Sarah’s presented statements. For example, Sarah may be assuming that loyalty to current American citizens has higher moral value than humanitarian concerns for individuals seeking political asylum who are not American citizens. When listening, Bill not only attends to presented statements, but also to what is absent.

This is a prime example of what is known as a fallacy of equivocation, which can be defined as the failed attempt to derive a conclusion from an argument that relies on the use of more than one meaning or sense of a term.

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Summary Listening clearly plays an important role within the domain of reasoning, as listeners are engaged in the activity of identifying and classifying normativity, evidentiary status, relational patterns, and occurrency as informational types. Such identification and classification occurs not only for basic presented information, but also involves a meta‐level identification and classification of relational patterns as well as gleaned information from the patterns of non‐ occurrent information or premises. This description of the role of listening within reasoning illustrates that listening is both layered and highly reflexive: It is an activity that continues over time, is organized and coordinated in the pursuit of knowledge advancement, and it is clearly purposive toward that goal. It is also improvable. Although we commonly think of listening as the passive intake of sound, listening is an activity which is epistemic and inherently cognitive. Philosophy’s unique conception of listening as an activity as defined above, and the reliance on listening within reasoning, yields specific methodological considerations for listening scholars, such as (i) the study of context; (ii) examination of normativity, evidentiary status, relational patterns, and occurrency; (iii) both short‐term and longitudinal studies of students within critical thinking and logic courses; and (iv) framing effects on listening. The context in which the activity of listening occurs could be either solitary or interpersonal (given that we granted that listening can occur via the phenomenon of inner speech; see Manusov, this volume), so how one functions as a listener (and hence whether one improves) may vary with the context. For example, in an interpersonal context, the speed with which we are bombarded with information in a rapid‐fire conversation may have a strong effect on our performance as a listener and contrast greatly with instances in which we are presented with the same information at a slower pace via inner speech. Context may also affect whether we improve as a listener. For example, the high emotionality of interpersonal conversations may interfere both with our performance as a listener and our motivation to improve through continued activity (hence “blocking another out” or disengagement). Listening scholars can investigate the activity of listening, examining how listeners attend to the various informational types and exploring the range of fallacies and logical forms of argument that philosophers have compiled. Because philosophers have extensively researched and studied logical forms, argument types, types of logic, and types of fallacies, philosophy is a gold mine in terms of offering concrete and discrete measures for studying listening as an activity. And of course, a very easy way to study listening would be to engage in extensive study of critical thinking and logic courses as forms of existing interventions. Such courses seem ready‐made for research on the types of information to which listeners attend, providing means of analyzing the development of listening skills over time, both by tracking individual persons longitudinally and in the aggregate. Framing effects provide another potential area of research for listening scholars. Framing can have a powerful impact on the types of information that listeners both identify and classify, and may moderate not only performance, but also long‐ term development. Reasoning is inevitably related to understanding, our next domain.

Listening and Understanding Advancing knowledge within philosophy involves not only information about the natural and social world, but also our knowledge of other human agents as a category. A large part of human existence involves the prediction and explanation of the behavior of others. Even simple and mundane tasks, such as driving to work, involve myriad opportunities to predict and explain other drivers. For example, when I pull up to a stop sign at which three of the four cars have all arrived at the same time, I notice that the driver in the car to the right of me – which should go first given traffic laws – keeps looking down. I quickly posit a reasonable explanation

Philosophy 223 for her behavior: She’s distracted by her cell phone or twiddling with the radio controls. On the basis of that explanation, I can predict that she will not initiate driving through the intersection. Such quick, intuitive, and easy interpretations of events and the human agents that act within them often occur below the level of conscious attention, yet they are no less important for their lack of conscious effort or transparency. Such cases are ubiquitous in our experience, and listening certainly plays a role in how we predict, explain, and understand others. By considering our ability to understand others and some of the capacities essential to this domain, we can better understand the role of listening within philosophy.

Understanding Others: Sympathy Although he was by no means the first philosopher to examine human behavior and theorize about our ability to understand human agents, David Hume (2000) offered a broad, systematic, and integrated account as part of his theory about human nature. Along with other philosophers of the enlightenment period, he focused on questions about the nature of human reasoning, psychological capacities and how they operated in the mind, and how the various capacities functioned to attain and advance knowledge. Hume put forward an account of the mind carved into a variety of capacities that contribute to the process of reasoning, much like current views of the mind recently popularized in Daniel Kahneman’s (2013) book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Dual‐process theorists posit that quick, intuitive, automatic, and unconscious processing results from System One, and that slow, effortful, deliberate, and conscious processing results from System Two.4 Hume held that reason (as a system) was the capacity responsible for evaluating the truth and falsity of claims and evidence, considering cause and effect relations, recalling factual details, and making probability projections. He postulated a separate system or capacity, which he called sympathy, that was responsible for intuitive and automatic interpretations, affective responses, and normative evaluations. He was also extremely interested in the phenomenon of motivation, and famously argued that all human motivation  –  including motivation for moral action  –  must stem from the psychological capacity of sympathy and not from reason alone. Although Hume offered fascinating arguments for the relation and interaction of these two capacities, our focus is on sympathy. Hume, along with his fellow Scotsman Adam Smith, maintained that the psychological system of sympathy can be activated and operate in a variety of contexts: engaging in conversation, interacting but not engaging in conversation, observation, and through imagination. Hume also argued that we can have a sympathetic response for human agents in real time, with fictional characters (whether portrayed on a stage, screen, or in a novel), or with distant human agents not in real time (via hearing or reading about them in travel reports). One does not need to be in a close, interpersonal context to activate sympathy, for Smith (2010) described a sympathetic response as sharing a “fellow feeling” with another. To give a simple example of fellow feeling, consider the power of film. Imagine that Sarah is a mother and watches a film in which a child dies in the arms of his mother. She observes the mother crying, in anguish, and overcome with sadness and grief for the loss of her child. Smith argued that sympathy, as a psychological system, allows Sarah to feel and experience similar affects, emotions, and normative evaluations in this moment. In watching the scene of the child’s death, Sarah will experience not only what the actor in the film portrays, but There is nothing essentially new in the proposal that there are different systems within the mind, as many philosophers have held this view over the centuries. In addition to Hume (2000), Adam Smith (2010), and William James (1884) provided the most obvious examples in the history of philosophy. For more current work in psychology and cognitive science that provides empirical vindication of such philosophical work, see texts by Chaiken & Trope (1999), Sloman (1996), or Evans (1984).

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224 Mower also what most mothers in that situation would experience and how they would evaluate it. Hume and Smith viewed sympathy as a natural capacity, part of our universal human nature as biological animals, albeit trained and shaped by the cultures in which we live. Because sympathy yields fellow‐feeling, we are able to have quick, intuitive, and easy interpretations of events, reliable explanations and predictions on the basis of them, and normative evaluations based on our sympathetic response.

Sympathy vs. Empathy Interestingly, the concept of empathy, as used in regular language today, developed within a different body of literature – the philosophy of mind. Although Hume and Smith included how subjects normatively evaluate situations or events as part of an account of sympathy, modern philosophers of mind have focused exclusively on how subjects postulate the mental states of another (e.g., that the mother holding her dying son is feeling sadness – explaining why she is crying as well as other subsequent behaviors). One vein of research proposed a “folk” theory of the mind. “Folk” theories are pre‐theoretic and often tacit conceptions that we develop and use in regular life, specialized for specific domains such as minds, biology, physics, and even mathematics.5 Known as “theory‐­ theorists,” these scholars focused on what comprised such tacit and systematic representations or “theories” about minds, examining the collective body of knowledge about mental states as well as connections between mental states and behavior (Fodor, 1968; D’Andrade, 1987; Leslie, 1987). A second vein of research countered that we postulate and attribute mental states to others not based on tacit bodies of knowledge about minds, but on a process of simulation – as though we were ourselves in the situation (Gordon, 1986; Ravenscroft, 1998). Philosophers of mind became increasingly interested in the accuracy of mental state attributions (i.e., targeting the mental states of another), how subjects separate their own mental states from another, and the affective differences ­between a subject and their target’s mental states. To categorize these differences, scholars began distinguishing between sympathy and empathy (Steuber, 2006). We commonly use the term “sympathy” to mean that we feel sorry for another and the term “empathy” to capture the notion that we identify with another. Similarly, scholars used the term “sympathy” to mark affective differences between a subject’s mental state and that of their target. For example, Sarah might attribute the mental state of fear to Bill upon learning that his company is downsizing. This is a case of sympathy, because Sarah does not have the mental state of fear: Perhaps she experiences concern or sorrow for him, but she does not have the same mental state as Bill. But if Sarah attributes fear to Bill and she herself experiences fear, she is empathizing with him: She not only attributes but also shares a mental state. The distinction between empathy and sympathy underscores the importance of understanding the mental states of others from the standpoint of the other agent’s experience. Scholars also began to stretch the concept of empathy to capture a motivational component, using the term “empathy” to identify instances in which compassion or caring was the impetus or motivation to try to understand the mental states of another (not merely for one’s own purposes in the prediction and explanation of behavior) (Coplan & Goldie, 2014).

For example, humans seem to have “folk” theories of physics, demonstrated by the fact that even pre‐ linguistic children exhibit surprise when objects violate their expectations by sudden disappearance or inexplicable movement.

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Moral Sensitivity Recently, scholars began exploring the related but distinct concept of moral sensitivity (Mower, Vandenberg, & Robison, 2015). Moral sensitivity is a complex discriminative capacity that enables one to identify, interpret, understand, and act appropriately in response to moral properties and issues within situations and events. Although the term was coined by developmental psychologist James Rest (1982) in his review of moral literature, most scholars recognize moral sensitivity as a return to and expansion of the concept of sympathy, with an emphasis on its role within proper moral functioning. Moral sensitivity involves a broader, systems‐based approach to thinking about how subjects identify moral properties and issues. It goes beyond the more limited focus of gleaning normative information from statements or understanding the mental states of another agent. Scholars are building on Hume and Smith’s insights about extensive social training, schema formation, pattern recognition, habit formation, and implicit knowledge, and how each of these contribute to the often automatic ways in which we seamlessly identify and integrate normative information from all aspects of a situation. Most importantly, moral sensitivity guides normatively appropriate responsive action, which is essential for how we engage with others and navigate complex social situations. For example, while walking my dog recently, I came across an elderly woman outside, alone, and poorly dressed for the weather. She was visibly shaken and crying, alternately claiming that she was looking for her husband (she did not understand why his truck was there, yet he was not home) and claiming that she must leave her husband because he was hurting her. She simultaneously claimed that a vague “someone” from her family was coming to help her and that she had no idea of who to call. And while she kept urging me to leave because she did not want to get me involved, she also begged me to stay or to take her with me. Clearly this is an instance in which fellow feeling (experiencing the same mental state and having the same evaluative response), sympathy (feeling sorry for her plight given her very obvious fear), or empathy (being motivated to try to understand her and to identity with her because of care or compassion) are woefully insufficient. Various situational clues such as her location on the road (and hence, which house she might have come from), inappropriate dress (she left in a hurry), her age, inconsistent statements and goals, and emotional responses all provided important forms of information for a context surrounding her and the situation itself. I also considered patterns of elder abuse, spousal abuse, and behaviors indicating dementia in light of her statements and the situational cues. Ultimately, I decided to return her to her husband – making a guess as to the right house – and to engage in a conversation with him before making any further decisions. After a long conversation in which I listened carefully to both of them, her husband and I jointly escorted her back safely into the house. As a complex discriminative capacity, moral sensitivity allowed me to navigate an ambiguous and normatively weighty situation. While the prediction and explanation of human behavior, understanding the mental states of others, and normative evaluation all contribute to moral sensitivity, the focus instead is on the proper moral functioning of an agent.

The Role of Listening for Sympathy, Empathy, and Moral Sensitivity Listening clearly plays an important role for sympathy, empathy, and moral sensitivity within the domain of understanding and appears to have two functions. First, on a Humean account of sympathy, listening can initiate the activation of sympathy. Much of what we learn within social events and about what occurs to other human agents we gain through the activity of listening: A neighbor tells us about a problem at work, a friend describes the loss of a loved one, or we hear eye‐witness testimony on the evening news. Any of these instances can activate sympathy and yield a sympathetic response. Second, on a Smithian account of sympathy, listening functions as an activity which has a direct relation to the intensity and accuracy of

226 Mower one’s fellow feeling with another. For example, if Sarah hears a government worker describing the financial impact of the recent American government shut down, she may experience the same emotional state and evaluative response. But the longer she listens, even if no new information is presented, the continual reengagement of the activity of listening likely increases the intensity and accuracy of that response. With empathy, the activity of listening gains new motivational force. We can simultaneously understand why someone initiates the activity of listening (e.g., because of empathetic compassion or care) and what drives someone to become a better listener (e.g., one is motivated by her compassion to listen longer, more carefully, to become more accurate in attributing a mental state). Finally, with moral sensitivity, listening is crucial to identifying moral properties and issues by providing a broad array of information about the mental states and patterns of social interaction of other human agents, as well as properties or aspects of situations (e.g., brute auditory information such as the screeching of car tires on pavement). Although listening is not necessary for moral sensitivity, the activity of listening – whether done deliberately or automatically – clearly enhances one’s capacity to discriminate, identify, and respond appropriately. The ways that listening functions and interacts with sympathy, empathy, and moral sensitivity generates interesting methodological considerations and proposals for listening research. Given Hume’s theoretical account of sympathy, listening should activate sympathy, but it is an open empirical question as to whether it will do so. Further, listening scholars could study the precise conditions of the activation by varying aspects of listening, such as the length of time, type of information, interpersonal versus group contexts, and the presence or absence of particular affects (e.g., fear as opposed to sadness). Given Smith’s account of sympathy, listening scholars could explore what conditions of listening increase the accuracy of one’s fellow feeling with another as well as types of evaluative responses. The motivational component of compassion and care as part of empathy suggests that some motivations for engaging in listening may increase accuracy in understanding the mental states of another. To plumb the relationship between moral sensitivity and listening, it would be interesting to study the relationship between listening accuracy on non‐normative properties and identification of moral properties and issues. Such an empirical study would tease apart normative from non‐normative content and help to answer whether listening provides a unique support for moral sensitivity.

Listening and Intellectual Virtues As an activity, listening is improvable, entailing both standards of improvement and excellence in performance. Although many people commonly think of the term “virtue” as an exclusively moral notion, philosophers use the term to indicate a skill or trait of performative excellence, distinguishing between intellectual and character virtues (for explanation of and disagreements over this distinction, see Driver, 2003). Intellectual virtues are broadly conceived as those faculties or powers that enhance our intellectual excellence. For example, they may be faculties that help us to aim at truth, reasoning, or knowledge, such as open‐mindedness, humility, and civility – each of which we will address below. As skills, human agents can, of course, build them over time. Even conceived of as faculties, we tend to think they can be developed or enhanced over time. For example, we might think that all human agents have the capacity for reasoning (as part of basic human biology, similarly to a capacity for sight), but grant that it could be honed, improved, or expanded via training and experience. Character virtues are broadly conceived as those skills that advance human functioning across a variety of different domains and contexts, including the advancement of knowledge, information, and our intellectual life (e.g., honesty, temperance, or courage). Clearly, temperance is a characterological trait that one can develop and enhance over time, and hence, it can become a form of excellence. An individual who has temperance will be

Philosophy 227 able to apply it to many contexts and cases, whether it involves, for instance, portion size in meals, limiting spending on grocery bills, controlling the amount of time spent binge‐watching favorite shows, or regulating emotional responses when receiving critical feedback from one’s boss. But it is also quite clear that temperance – along with the other character virtues – enhances and enables the functioning of intellectual virtues. For example, people possessing temperance can set aside distractions to study, maintain work goals, and ­manage frustrations and setbacks. Although the precise relation between character and intellectual virtues is fascinating and subject to a lively debate within philosophy, our focus is on intellectual virtues and on open‐mindedness, intellectual humility, and civility in particular.

Open‐Mindedness Most generally, open‐mindedness is conceived of as the willingness to consider and revise beliefs based on evidence in contrast to credulity and dogmatism (Roberts & Wood, 2007; Riggs, 2010; Hare, 1979; Hazlett, 2012). Understood in this way, open‐mindedness has a clear ­connection to the advancement and development of knowledge and the emphasis placed on it within philosophy. Although there are many definitions and conceptions of open‐mindedness in the philosophical literature, the two most representative treat open‐mindedness as either being truth‐conducive or motivational. On the truth‐conducive conception, open‐­mindedness is outcomes based (Baehr, 2011a, 2011b). In this case, open‐mindedness is conceived as an intellectual virtue, commonly involved in purposive efforts to attain truth and knowledge, and has a high probability of increasing true beliefs. Although having the intellectual virtue of open‐mindedness is no guarantee that one will advance knowledge or gain true beliefs, it tends to do so. This contrasts with the conception of open‐mindedness as motives based (Battaly, 2004; Zagzebski, 1996). In this case, open‐mindedness is conceived as having a motivational component to seek the truth. It is this motivation or drive to seek the truth – whether or not one attains it in any given instance – that is the hallmark of someone who is open‐minded and the primary means of distinguishing between open‐mindedness from dogmatism.

Intellectual Humility When we consider how the term “humility” is commonly used, we tend to think of someone who is servile, self‐effacing, quiet or shy, lacking in self‐confidence, and who avoids the limelight. Humility involves one’s evaluation of one’s self and personal accomplishments in ways that minimize those accomplishments; that is, humility is a self‐assessment on a global scale involving not only one’s accomplishments but also one’s character. In contrast with the notion of regular humility, philosophers are currently exploring the concept of intellectual humility as the lack of epistemic obstructions such as conceit or bias, which allows for honest evaluation of one’s beliefs, capacities, and the limits of knowledge. Although there is deep disagreement about the nature of intellectual humility (see Church, 2016; Tanesini, 2016; Kidd, 2016; Roberts & Wood, 2007), the conception gaining prominence is known as the “Limitations‐Owning” view, which holds that intellectual humility is the recognition and “owning” of our cognitive limitations (Whitcomb, Battaly, Baehr, & Howard‐ Snyder, 2017). Individuals possessing the virtue of intellectual humility do not make a global self‐assessment of accomplishments or character. Instead, they make a more limited assessment on either the quality of the particular beliefs they hold or their capacity to attain knowledge. There are many forms of intellectual limitation such as “gaps in knowledge (e.g. ignorance of current affairs), cognitive mistakes (e.g. forgetting an appointment), unreliable processes (e.g. bad vision or memory), deficits in learnable skills (e.g. being bad at math), intellectual character

228 Mower flaws (e.g. a tendency to draw hasty inferences), and much more besides” (Whitcomb et al., 2017, p. 8). Furthermore, this conception of intellectual humility requires that individuals have the right stance towards their intellectual limitations: In particular, they should be properly attentive to their intellectual limitations and “own” – in the sense of accepting – these ­limitations. Such recognition and acceptance has important consequences as it can lead us to recognize that our beliefs might be wrong, to admit that our evidence might be weaker than we would like to believe, and to motivate us to be more willing to accept new and varied sources of evidence and to reevaluate beliefs. In an important way, intellectual humility yields a willingness to be receptive (that some have called willingness to listen: see Vickery, 2018).

Civility For many, the concept of civility is synonymous with politeness or manners. For others, it is equated with political correctness or restrictions on free‐speech. In the first instance, civility is taken to be inconsequential. In the second instance, civility is taken to be something insidious and a power play. Despite these common assumptions about the term “civility,” the philosophical concept of civility is an old and venerated one that intersects morality, communication, and politics. Over the centuries, civility (under a variety of labels such as “tolerance” or “civic friendship”) has most often been thought to be a civic virtue necessary for the health and flourishing of civil society: governing how we interact and live with others, addressing substantive conflicts, and navigating pluralistic religious belief and conceptions of the good life (Aristotle, 1999; Hume, 2000; Smith, 2010; Locke, 1983; Shils, 1997; Rawls, 1993; Ladenson, 2012). Perhaps most overtly related to listening, civility is also thought of as a c­ ommunicative virtue: a virtue necessary for the proper governance of communication and disputes (Calhoun, 2000; Boyd, 2006; Laverty, 2012). Calhoun (2000) noted that while civility makes use of standards of socially acceptable behaviors, forms of communication, or views about what is morally acceptable, civility is not a mere communicative norm. She argued that we cannot assume that our moral norms, held as individual reasoners, suffice for determining when another is owed a civil response. She argued that civility is a moral virtue (not merely a social norm) necessary to govern highly contentious moral disputes in which we do not share the same moral views as others, stating that “civility is thus akin, not to integrity, but to civil obedience” (p. 272); it presents restrictions on how we respond as well as when we must respond to others, even when finding their views personally morally objectionable. Conceived in this way, civility is a regulative moral virtue to govern what we communicate to others. More recent work on civility has expanded the conception beyond that of a civic or communicative virtue to that of an intellectual virtue. As an intellectual virtue, civility is necessary for our social engagement with others in the enterprise of belief evaluation (Mower, 2019). Civility is an orienting attitude that guides both the process of belief evaluation and our interactions with others through commitment to behavioral parameters and evidentiary standards. This focus on the interaction with others to evaluate belief extends civility beyond the regulation of moral disputes to the standards for dynamic engagement, including the necessary attitudes that motivate such engagement. This reconceptualization of civility replaces the goal of regulating moral disputes with that of seeking truth and knowledge attainment, emphasizing the purpose of engaging with others more broadly.

Connections Between Intellectual Virtues and Listening There are some important connections between listening and the intellectual virtues of open‐ mindedness, intellectual humility, and civility. Drawing on the truth‐conductive conception of open‐mindedness, listening has a high probability of increasing true beliefs given that it is an

Philosophy 229 activity that continues through time, is coordinated by the epistemic goal of advancing knowledge, and is improvable. Using the model of open‐mindedness as a guide, we can begin to think more broadly about listening and whether it is also an intellectual virtue. Philosophers mark an additional distinction between intellectual virtues that are viewed as acquired character traits (such as intellectual conscientiousness) and those that are viewed as mental faculties (such as perception). This distinction is important because it traces whether an individual is responsible for the development of the virtue (such as intellectual conscientiousness) or whether the focus should be on how well it functions and addresses conditions to enhance that function (such as perception). If listening is an intellectual virtue, it would seem to be that of a mental faculty, which not only shifts the focus to addressing conditions of proper functioning and enhancement but also encourages us to conceptualize listening (defined as an activity) as an intellectual virtue or skill reliably conductive for truth. Thinking of listening as a possible intellectual faculty virtue has implications for intellectual humility as well. Someone who has intellectual humility would be self‐reflective about her capacity for listening (among others), accessing limitations, and accepting the need for improvement. For example, suppose that upon assessing her capacity for listening, Sarah ­recognizes and “owns” the fact that she rarely listens to another for any length of time before interrupting, and that she often mischaracterizes details (based on her observation that others routinely correct her characterizations). Although listening as a capacity or intellectual faculty virtue has not been a focus of scholarship on intellectual humility, it may be the case that intellectual humility is necessary for good listening (see Rice and Burbules, 2010; Krumrei‐Mancuso & Rouse, 2016; Krumrei‐Mancuso, Haggard, LaBouff & Rowatt, 2019). Lastly, the notion of civility as an orienting attitude carries some interesting implications for motivating good listening. As an orienting attitude, civility encourages and maintains engagement with others, directs the activity or enterprise of evaluating belief through specific standards, and provides guidance for appropriate behavior. The full nature of how civility guides good listening is not the purpose of this chapter, but note that at minimum, civility encourages engagement (both initial and continuing), and the display of active listening is part of appropriate behavior. All these considerations suggest normative requirements for good listening; specifically, that to be a good listener one must have the intellectual virtues of open‐mindedness, intellectual humility, and civility as an orienting attitude (see Porter & Schumann, 2017). Our discussion of intellectual virtue also yields interesting methodological considerations and proposals for future listening research. Listening scholars could institute research on listening as a faculty virtue. It would be fascinating to discover whether listening could be advanced more quickly or to a greater degree (for example) than other faculty virtues. A second area of future research could examine the relation between a subject’s awareness and acceptance of limitations on their capacity for listening and their subsequent performance on various listening tasks. Recall that the “Limitations Owning” conception of intellectual humility requires a self‐analysis and awareness of one’s limitations. Using these insights, researchers could explore the effects of individual listening assessments, particularly how such self‐assessments of one’s capacity for listening moderate or alter various behaviors in listening interactions. A third area of future research could examine the effect of various motivations on listening behavior. The motives based conception of open‐mindedness requires a motive to seek the truth as a necessary condition of open‐mindedness. The conception of civility as an orienting attitude requires a motive to engage with others (in a project of belief evaluation) and to maintain appropriate behavioral standards while doing so. These two motivations for open‐mindedness and civility as an orienting attitude, although related, differ importantly in that the latter does not require that one seek the truth, while the former does not require engagement or a commitment to behavioral standards. How might motivations (such as these two rather than others) affect individual listening practices, yield true beliefs (truth conductive), or result in a modification of belief? A possible consequence of the motivational requirement in civility (as an orienting attitude) is that it will

230 Mower impact long‐term outcomes for both belief modification and increased true belief because of continued engagement (and the impact such continued engagement has on the motivation of one’s interlocutor as well). Listening scholars could not only examine the effect of particular motivations relative to others, but also track long‐term effects to examine whether results compound over time.

Conclusion Although the concept of listening has not been a focus of research within the discipline of ­philosophy, it is clear that listening has played a key role within the discipline from the start. The conception of listening, as an activity, yields three criteria: iteration or continuation, organization or coordination via a goal, and improvability. Given the focus of the discipline on the attainment and advancing of knowledge, listening functions within the discipline of philosophy by serving that epistemic goal. Perhaps most interestingly, the concept of listening as an activity has been demonstrably constant over time and across various domains within the discipline. By examining the various domains of reasoning, understanding, and intellectual virtue, we have not only seen how listening is related to the development of a large number of other concepts (e.g., empathy, civility), but also uncovered how it functions in slightly different ways given its relation to the concepts and purposes of a particular domain. The examination of each of these domains offers deeper conceptualizations of listening as an activity, and each suggests a number of proposals for future scholarship and research on listening. Let us hope that as researchers and scholars we are able to listen to each other across disciplines.

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Philosophy 231 Gordon, R. (1986). Folk psychology as simulation. Mind and Language, 1,158–171. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1468‐0017.1986.tb00324.x Hare, W. (1979). Open‐mindedness and education. Montreal: McGill‐Queen’s University Press. Hazlett, A. (2012). Higher‐order epistemic attitudes and intellectual humility, Episteme, 9, 205–223. https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.11 Hume, D. (2000). In D. Norton & M. J. Norton (Eds.), A treatise of human nature. New York: Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1738). Kahneman, D. (2013) Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Kidd, I. J. (2016). Intellectual humility, confidence, and argumentation. Topoi, 35, 395–402. https:// doi.org/10.1007/s11245‐015‐9324‐5 Krumrei‐Mancuso, E. J. & Rouse, S. (2016). The development and validation of the comprehensive intellectual humility scale. Journal of Personality Assessment, 98, 209–221. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00223891.2015.1068174 Krumrei‐Mancuso, E. J., Haggard, M., LaBouff, J. P. & Rowatt, W. C. (2019). Links between intellectual humility and acquiring knowledge. Journal of Positive Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2019.1579359 James, W. (1884). What is an emotion? Mind, 9, 188–205. https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/os‐IX.34.188 Ladenson, R. (2012). Civility as democratic civic virtue. In D. S. Mower & W. Robison (Eds.), Civility in politics and education (pp. 207–220). New York: Routledge. Laverty, M. (2012). Communication and civility. In D. S. Mower & W. Robison (Eds.), Civility in politics and education (pp. 65–79). New York: Routledge. Leslie, A. (1987). Pretense and representation: The origins of “theory of mind.” Psychological Review, 94, 412–426. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033‐295X.94.4.412 Locke, J. (1983). A letter concerning toleration. (J. H. Tully, Ed.), Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. (Original work published 1689). Mower, D. S. (2019). The real morality of public discourse: Civility as an orienting attitude. In R. Boatright, S. Sobieraj, D. G. Young, & Timothy J. Shaffer (Eds.), A crisis of civility?: Political discourse and its discontents (pp. 210–232). New York: Routledge. Mower, D. S., Vandenberg, P., & Robison, W. (Eds.) (2015). Developing moral sensitivity. New York: Routledge. Plato. (1966). The Seventh Letter. In Plato in Twelve Volumes (Vol. 7) (R.G. Bury, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Original work published 360 BCE). Retrieved from http://www. perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0164:letter=7 Porter, T. & Schumann, K. (2017). Intellectual humility and openness to the opposing view. Self and Identity, 17, 139–162. https://doi.org/10.1080/15298868.2017.1361861 Ravenscroft, I. (1998). What is it like to be someone else? Simulation and empathy. Ratio, 11, 170–185. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467‐9329.00062 Rawls, J. (1993). Political liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Rest, J. (1982). A psychologist looks at the teaching of ethics. The Hastings Center Report, 12, 29–36. https://doi.org/10.2307/3560621 Rice, S., & Burbules, N. (2010). Listening: A virtue account. Teachers College Record, 112, 2728–2742. Riggs, W. (2010). Open‐mindedness. Metaphilosophy, 41, 172–188. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467‐ 9973.2009.01625.x Roberts, R., & Wood, J. (2007). Intellectual virtues: An essay in regulative epistemology. New York: Oxford University Press. Shils, E. (1997). The virtue of civility. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Sloman, S. (1996). The empirical case for two systems of reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 119, 3–22. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033‐2909.119.1.3 Smith, A. (2010). The theory of moral sentiments. (R. P. Hanley, Ed.). New York: Penguin. (Original work published 1759). Steuber, K. (2006). Rediscovering empathy: Agency, folk psychology, and the human sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tanesini, A. (2016). Intellectual humility as attitude. Philosophy and phenomenological research, 93, 399– 420. https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12326

232 Mower Vickery, A. J. (2018). Willingness to Listen (WTL). In D. L. Worthington & G. D. Bodie (Eds.), Sourcebook of listening research: Methodology and measures (pp. 617–623). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Whitcomb, D., Battaly, H., Baehr, J. & Howard‐Snyder, D. (2017). Intellectual humility: Owning our limitations. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 94, 509–539. https://doi.org/10.1111/ phpr.12228 Zagzebski, L. T. (1996). Virtues of the mind: An inquiry into the nature of virtue and the ethical ­foundations of knowledge. New York: Cambridge University Press.

14

Psychology Margarete Imhof

Psychology deals with human behavior and mental processes – what shapes and drives them, how they work, and how they develop. Psychological science seeks to describe, explain, p ­ redict, transform (or control), and evaluate human behavior and pertaining mental processes. While psychology as an independent academic discipline is relatively young (James, 1890; see also Wundt, 1896), today a variety of distinct subdivisions of psychology exist. For instance, General Psychology explores sensory processes and basic perceptions within and across the senses, Cognitive Psychology studies the organization of the mind as it stores and retrieves information and how this is reflected in the brain, Social Psychology investigates the ways in which individuals influence and are influenced by others, and Developmental Psychology examines the (typical) development of behavior and competences across the life span. As an applied science, psychology looks at the principles of learning and instruction (Educational Psychology), deviant behavior, helping and healing (Clinical Psychology), and supporting people in their professional and personal lives (Organizational Psychology, Psychology of Communication). Historically, psychological methods have swung back and forth between an emphasis on overt behavior and the investigation of covert and mental processes. The early emphasis on experimental research acknowledged introspection as a valid method of capturing descriptions of thoughts and emotional states, while later behaviorism accepted only observ­ able behavior as a source for recording and understanding (human) behavior. In the wake of the cognitive revolution, current psychology recognizes both approaches to research and pro­ vides instruments for integrating measurements from either source. Elements of listening have presence within various sub‐disciplines of psychology. Psycholinguistics scholars have arguably generated the greatest amount of research focusing on topics such as listening as speech perception (Harley, 2008, 2010; Jay, 2003) and the prin­ ciples of auditory perception (e.g., perception of tones, recognition of speech patterns; Anderson, 2004). Experimental paradigms have used dichotic listening tasks to explore attention and perception (Broadbent, 1957; Cohen, 1993). More comprehensive concepts, such as active listening, have been emphasized in psychotherapy and counseling psychology (Rogers & Farson, 1957). Despite these forays into listening elements, however, listening as an area of study has not benefited from a coherent examination by psychology researchers. For the sake of conciseness, this chapter focuses on listening to speech and (coherent) ­language. It is organized into two parts. In Part I, I utilize a model of listening as information The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

234 Imhof processing (Imhof, 2010b) to organize and present findings on the cognitive functions and mechanisms involved in listening. Part II examines the impact of individual differences on the process and product of listening. Throughout the chapter I draw upon a range of listening‐ related psychological research for illustration and support.

Part I: Listening and the Architecture of the Cognitive System To survey and integrate research pertaining to listening, I propose to build on the cognitive theory of information processing and multi‐media learning proposed by Mayer (1996, 2014). Figure  14.1 presents an adaptation of Mayer’s model for listening that I began developing almost a decade ago (Imhof, 2010b, 2016). Reflecting this model, for our pur­ poses, listening is defined as the intentional selection, organization, and integration of verbal and nonverbal information provided in oral and/or audio communication. The ­theoretical perspective is rooted in a constructivist view of cognition (Burleson, 2011) and acknowledges that listening can be described both in terms of open behavior and covert mental processes. Listening includes both automatic processes (e.g., hearing and perceptive psycho‐acoustic mechanisms, categorizing of sound), and controlled cognitive processes (e.g., intentional attention allocation, rehearsing information, word and sentence processing, effortful self‐­ regulation, and integrating information from diverse sources and across senses; Imhof, 2010b, 2016). In line with the claims of a dual‐process theory of the mind, we find both fast, associative, low‐effort, and intuitive processes as well as deliberative and effortful processes (Evans & Stanovich, 2013; Samuels, 2009) involved in information processing from the acoustic modality.

Step 1: Building an Intention to Listen Hearing and listening share the aural modality. Hearing in the sense of auditory perception is basically automatic and cannot be avoided, while listening is marked by controlled processes which are intentional and effortful. This transition is discussed in the following section.

Intention to listen: What for?

Sensory register and attention regulation

Integration

Selection Verbal information Nonverbal information voice gestures

Long term memory

Working memory

Structure sound patterns

Identify words Decode structure: phrases & sentences

Use schemata

Identify sources & sound streams

Assign meaning

Evaluate

Use prior knowledge Make necessary inferences Build a text representation

Connect new & old information

Organization

Figure 14.1  Listening as a four‐step process of information processing.

Draw conclusions

Psychology 235

The Pre‐listening Phase

The introduction of sound waves to a working ear inevitably results in acoustic perception on a very basic level. In line with dual‐process models of cognition, the automatic response is an essential feature of a monitoring system against sudden changes in the environment (Dalton & Lavie, 2004). Fast processing of acoustic signals is critical for communication across larger distances such as when someone shouts a warning against danger or when an infant cries for the mother (Bornstein et al., 2017; Lingle, Wyman, Kotrba, Teichroeb, & Romanow, 2012). The auditory perceptual system quickly processes relevant sound information and elicits appro­ priate behavioral responses, with seemingly little effort or mental control. For example, most of us have experienced the “cocktail‐party effect” (Cherry, 1953). In a noisy room with many simultaneous conversations, we still hear our name being spoken in the far end of the room, even when we are not otherwise involved in the respective conversation. The step from hearing to listening requires switching from an automatic to a controlled mode of processing (Burleson, 2011; Smith & Collins, 2009). As a person builds an intention or gen­ erates a goal for listening, the cognitive system establishes a selective filter to separate relevant from irrelevant sound, to prioritize the important information, and to (largely) ignore distract­ ing signals. While hearing is “elicited by the characteristics of the stimuli that are bombarding our senses” (Cohen, 1993, p. 5f.), listening “is the product of a planned, goal‐directed course of action” (Cohen, 1993, p. 6). We might draw a similar distinction between seeing and reading.

Inattentional Deafness

Auditory processing with a specific intention or goal creates a perceptual focus and changes the way in which the cognitive system performs mindful analyses of the acoustic environment. Listening with a goal typically increases the willingness to invest effort which in turn increases listening efficiency (Song & Iverson, 2018). Experimental evidence suggests that an intensive focus on one source of acoustic information can result in totally overhearing competing and interfering sounds, such as noise, tones, and even language (Neuhoff & Bochtler, 2018). For instance, Dalton and Fraenkel (2012) exposed participants to two simultaneous conversations, instructing them to selectively attend to only one of them. Most participants successfully identified the content of the conversation as instructed, but missed intruding acoustic information introduced by the experi­ menters (to listen to the experiments simulation, www.pc.rhul.ac.uk/sites/attentionlab/?cat=3). When the auditory perceptual system is occupied with a specific task, additional information on the same modality is likely to pass by unnoticed (Santangelo, Olivetti Belardinelli, & Spence, 2007). Listening intention stimulates top‐down processes resulting in mental schemata that guide the processing of the information. An early study by Anderson and Pichert (1978) illustrated the guiding power of mental schemata. In their experiment, participants were divided into two groups. Both groups listened to the same story about a family home, but one group was asked to listen to the story from the perspective of a potential burglar, while the other group listened from the perspective of a potential homebuyer. As predicted, each group retrieved information that was relevant to their instructed perspective (e.g., the burglar instruction participants remembered that the key for the backdoor was deposited in the garage, that the stereo was upstairs, and that nobody was home on Thursdays; the “homebuyers” retained that the man­ telpiece was new and that the facade had just been renovated). Even more striking was the finding that information a listener originally dismissed as irrelevant could not later be recon­ structed, illustrating the directive force that schemata exert on the selection of information.

Step 2: Selection of Information The intention to listen defines a set of selection criteria which the listener applies to glean information from the acoustic environment. This typically involves separating relevant from

236 Imhof irrelevant acoustic information and binding acoustic perceptions and non‐acoustic information, such as visuals and hand gestures, into coherent and consistent streams of information.

Auditory Scene Analysis

The selection of information (see Figure  14.1) is a function of attentional processes (i.e., selective attention, divided attention, and attention switching). Selective attention is crucial for listeners to make sense of incoming acoustic information. In a natural setting, the acoustic environment is typically composed of a mix of acoustic events. In addition to speech from one or more speakers, listeners are exposed to a sound envelope, which contains a variety of signals, both continuous and changing state, and both relevant and irrelevant. Listeners need to seg­ regate speech from other sources of sound, to identify and separate the coherent auditory streams, and to prioritize one stream of acoustic information over the others (Bregman, 1990; Denham et al., 2014). The initial segregation of speech from other acoustic information, such as natural and technical sounds, noise, and music is facilitated by the fact that the human ear and auditory system is best equipped to identify sounds with speech quality. The outer and inner ear is most sensitive and receptive for the frequency band within which most human language is produced. At the percep­ tual level and from early in infant development, the human listener has a bias for speech identification (Grossmann, Oberecker, Koch, & Friederici, 2010; Mattys & Wiget, 2011; Shultz, Vouloumanos, Bennett, & Pelphrey, 2014; see also Altvater‐Mackensen, this volume). Additionally, auditory streaming is a rather efficient process. It uses predictability and spatial location (Bendixen, 2014; Böhm et al., 2013) and binds acoustic signals together along so‐called auditory Gestalt principles of similarity, proximity, common fate, and continuity (Bendixen et al., 2013; Bendixen, Denham, Gyimesi, & Winkler, 2010; Bregman, 1990, 2015; Simon & Winkler, 2018).

Monitoring Perception

The strain on the listener is conceptualized as a perceptual load. The load a listener experiences “determines successful attentional selection” (Murphy, Spence, & Dalton, 2017, p. 41). Perceptual load varies as a function of several parameters (Murphy et al., 2017). For example, it increases when the number of items that require attention or control increases (Bell, Röer & Buchner, 2013), when the level of similarity between the attended and the unattended signal rises (Rowland, Hartley, & Wiggins, 2018), and when additional perceptual operations are required in the process (e.g., as in a situation when the speech signal is degraded due to dis­ torted or missing sound segments; Cervantes Constantino & Simon, 2018; Cristia et  al., 2012; Imhof, Välikoski, Laukkanen, & Orlob, 2014; van de Ven, Tucker, & Ernestus, 2011). The cost of increased perceptual load may be impaired memory of the information despite processing efforts (Asano, 2018). Auditory selection regularly requires monitoring foreground and background stimuli (Gandras, Grimm, & Bendixen, 2018). Thus, disentangling several speakers and attending to one speaker specifically involves, in addition to selective functions, ignoring or suppressing irrelevant sound or speech (Fuglsang, Dau, & Hjortkjær, 2017; Hausfeld, Riecke, & Formisano, 2018; Mattys, Davis, Bradlow, & Scott, 2012). Gandras et al. (2018) took initial steps to investigate the principles of auditory scene analysis in multi‐speaker situations and looked at corresponding brain functions. It is an open question how a multi‐speaker scene affects the perceptual load and what factors contribute to relieve perceptual load. Listening to one particular speaker (i.e., following a coherent stream of speech input that carries consistent characteristics in terms of voice, linguistic and speech profile, and topic) might reduce percep­ tual load, particularly when combined with the semantic overlap and redundancy inherent in natural discourse. Voice processing and person recognition appear to be extremely efficient processes in the brain, functioning almost effortlessly (Mathias & von Kriegstein, 2014). As a

Psychology 237 consequence, perceptual load could be significantly reduced if familiar, or at least coherent, human voices are used as auditory input. In addition, listeners have a good chance to experience lower perceptual load due to expe­ rience‐based linguistic probability calculations as in conventionalized collocations and phrases. For example, it is safe to assume that an English‐speaking listener will have no problem and will not need to expend much effort to anticipate the continuation of “Ladies and …!” A robust body of experimental research supports the notion that the degree to which the selec­ tion of relevant speech against noise in real‐world acoustic scenes is a function of familiarity and practice (Fuglsang et al., 2017; Song & Iverson, 2018). In sum, the selection of auditory information through identification and segregation of streams of acoustic information form the percept that the listener uses for further processing (i.e., organizing information, such as categorizing and assigning meaning).

Step 3: Organization of Information Selected information is further processed to build a mental text representation (Gernsbacher, 1990; Kintsch, 1998). The listener generates a mental framework which accommodates a rep­ resentation of the discourse and the narrative to assign and update meaning (see Figure 14.1). In doing so, the listener also incorporates content from memory (e.g., prior knowledge and expectations associated with the current situation) (Jay, 2003). Organizing information when listening needs to account for processing both of verbal input and of social information.

Organizing Verbal Input

The analysis of the acoustic verbal input combines bottom‐up and top‐down processes. On the one hand, understanding speech involves bottom‐up processes, such as identifying phonemes, binding phonemes and morphemes to form words, building phrases from words that make up sentences or meaningful units, which together establish some type of discourse or narrative (Jay, 2003, p. 11). On the other hand, the cognitive system uses top‐down functions which call on existing schemata to extract meaning from the verbal input to arrive at text comprehension. Resolving ambiguity can serve as an example here. When, as a listener, we hear someone say: “Bob shot the robber in his underwear” (Jay, 2003, p. 13), the challenge is to organize the concepts used in this utterance in a meaningful way and to determine if Bob or the robber appeared in underwear. Both options are feasible, and it is only through making assumptions based on prior knowledge, context information, stereotypes, schemata, scripts, expectations, or other previously stored categories and communication conventions that a listener arrives at a conclusion (Clark, 1996; Jay, 2003). The assumption of bottom‐up processes in listening claims that a listener uses acoustic ­signals to build increasingly complex units: Use sounds to form words, phrases, and sentences, and to attach meaning to them. Models of word and speech recognition propose that access to the mental lexicon occurs stepwise based on the perceived information. The cohort model assumes that the onset of speech activates a set of lexical candidate items which are selected as gradually more information is available. The listener identifies: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

e el ele elev eleva

and keeps going until the uniqueness point which resolves the situation (is it elevator or elevation?) and thus constitutes a clear‐cut building brick for a sentence (Harley, 2008, 2010; Jay, 2003).

238 Imhof The TRACE model takes a different turn as it counts predominantly on top‐down processes in word recognition (Harley, 2008). According to the TRACE model, acoustic input, such as speech, activates existing networks which are closely interconnected. The resulting activation patterns determine which entries of the mental lexicon are selected and which others are inhib­ ited. The general context of an utterance determines which candidates are most feasible. This feature enables the listener to arrive at the appropriate identification of a word even in the case of a homophone (cf. bank) or in the case of figurative speech and ambiguity (cf. key, good). The impact of top‐down processes in organizing information can be determined as listeners draw on implicit and explicit knowledge of story grammars and text types to organize verbal information. Knowledge of the episodic and conventional structure of a discourse guides the decision on which information is central to the overall message and which pieces of information are unrelated to the gist of a story or the main point of an argument. Specific and adaptive schemata are needed to organize information from various forms of discourse – discourse that has different functions and goals and which varies with the number of speakers as well as inter­ activity (i.e., listening to a conversation versus listening to a speech). Top‐down processes in listening can be observed in the context‐driven phoneme restoration effect. When an acoustic signal is degraded or even missing, listeners can quite frequently and almost effortlessly, fill the information gap in a meaningful way. In the original experiment developed by Warren (1970), participants listened to the following sentences (the asterisk indicates a cough): 1. 2. 3. 4.

It was found that the *eel was on the shoe. It was found that the *eel was on the orange. It was found that the *eel was on the axle. It was found that the *eel was on the table.

Most participants arrived at a meaningful representation of the degraded speech, completing the utterances in line with the context. In other words, they reported that they had heard (1) heel, (2) peel, (3) wheel, and (4) meal, respectively. Since empirical evidence can be cited for both the bottom‐up and the top‐down models, it might make sense to propose that perception of continuous speech is a highly flexible process which can draw on both processing directions. Because language and speech processing is extremely relevant for humans, the adaptiveness of speech processing allows the listener to use a variety of structures and strategies to adjust the organization of verbal information from speech to the options and restrictions in a given situation, which includes switching from top‐ down to bottom‐up processing and back.

Organizing Social Information

In addition to the verbal message, listening situations also are a source of information about relevant characteristics of the speaker (friend or foe). Social Psychology has described exten­ sively how people “often use a sort of quick and dirty approach to information processing” (Smith & Collins, 2009, p. 197) when it comes to judging others. A long tradition of research has investigated how the fast and automatic processes utilize immediate voice information to form categories that are instrumental to identifying relevant information about a speaker’s state and trait characteristics (Addington, 1968; O’Sullivan, Ekman, Friesen, & Scherer, 1985; Scherer, 2003). For instance, listeners make social judgments and categorize speakers after minimal acoustic input along the lines of age, gender, race, emotional state, health, familiarity, and group status of the speaker (Schweinberger, Kawahara, Simpson, Skuk & Zäske, 2014), and possibly even mating potential (Bruckert, Liénard, Lacroix, Kreutzer & Leboucher, 2006; Hughes & Miller, 2016). Notably, social judgments are made almost automatically based on 500 ms samples of voice characteristics, such as pitch and intonation patterns (Ponsot, Arias, &

Psychology 239 Aucouturier, 2018; Ponsot, Burred, Belin, & Aucouturier, 2018). In the experiments reported in Ponsot, Burred, et al. (2018), participants listened to a series of different versions of “hello.” The stimuli were technically manipulated in two ways: First, the height of the mean pitch was changed. Second, the pitch dynamics of the utterance was manipulated. The authors con­ firmed earlier findings that a low pitch utterance is perceived as an expression of high domi­ nance, while a higher pitch utterance is associated with trustworthiness (Anolli & Ciceri, 1997; Ekman, Friesen, & Scherer, 1976; Zuckerman, Amidon, Bishop, & Pomerantz, 1982). The experiments consistently found that judgments of dominance and trustworthiness varied with the pitch contour (i.e., the speed and the direction of the pitch change across syllables). Gradual pitch decrease on both syllables was attributed to dominance, while a rapid pitch increase on the second syllable only was perceived to indicate trustworthiness (Ponsot, Burred, et al., 2018). Prosodic characteristics activate social judgments almost immediately with the onset of speech. A similar picture concerning the close relationship between voice characteristics and social judgments emerged in an experiment I conducted in 2010 (Imhof, 2010a). In this study, I manipulated speaker pitch, using semantically loaded stimulus material. In the study, listeners were asked to judge the personality of a female and a male voice talking about “how to repair the inner tube of a bike,” “how to prepare a shortcake,” and reading names and addresses from a directory. The recordings were presented in the original pitch and in technically manipulated versions in higher and lower pitch. Both pitch and semantic content interacted with the sex of the speaker, and both had a significant impact on social judgments (e.g., age, height, extraversion and openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability) made by the listeners. These and similar experimental results suggest that listeners draw on stored mental representations of voice signals and pertaining charac­ teristics, forming schemata which are automatically activated in a listening situation, and which are then used in forming person perception (Campanella & Belin, 2007; Stevenage, Hugill, & Lewis, 2012). Listeners use vocal cues, such as accent, to identify a person as a member of their own group or as an out‐group member. Human listeners have a strong preference for familiar voices (Maguinness, Roswandowitz & von Kriegstein, 2018). The schemata which lis­ teners use to categorize speakers are mentally represented and related neural mechanisms. In a recent functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) study, Jiang, Sanford, and Pell (2018) used semantically loaded statements which conveyed personal, speaker‐owned information. Statements were presented to native Canadian‐English speakers in English utilizing one of three grades of certainty (doubtful, neutral, and confident) in one of three accents: (i) Canadian‐English accent; (ii) English speakers from Australia; and (iii) French‐ Canadian speakers of English. The listeners would consider the Canadian‐English accent an in‐group accent, while they would perceive the foreign and regional accents in both the Australian and the French‐Canadian versions of the utterance as an out‐group accent. They collected credibility ratings of speakers and measured their related brain activity. Results showed that listeners found information from in‐group voices to be more believ­ able than information from out‐group voices. What is more, the neuroimaging data reflected that the stimuli elicited different patterns of brain activity related to acoustic processing depending on the combination of accent and vocal certainty. Information from out‐group voices was rated less believable than the same information from in‐group voices, even when it was expressed in a neutral or confident tone. Listeners seem to immediately place social relevance on speech characteristics, and to respond positively toward in‐group speakers, but with greater disbelief toward accented speakers. The authors suggest that accented statements might have placed higher processing demands on the cognitive system of the listeners, presumably because they had to override their bias towards disbelieving out‐group accents.

240 Imhof

The Role of Working Memory in Organizing Information

The unit that administers the organization of information is what cognitive psychologists have come to call working memory (Baddeley, 2006). Working memory performs and controls mental operations pertaining to information processing. It has been shown to be the single most important cognitive factor for predicting speech reception ability (Akeroyd, 2008). The architecture of the working memory includes a store for acoustic information, the so‐called phonological loop, which keeps speech and sound information active (Jones, Macken, & Nicholls, 2004). Working memory capacity is limited and unless relevant information is combined into meaningful units, a substantial proportion of the information will be lost. Working memory is affected by processing demands such as combining, categorizing, com­ paring, contrasting information, reducing complexity in verbose statements, tagging distal parts of information, separating facts from judgments, preparing for storage, and accounting for both the speaker’s and one’s own emotions (Baddeley, Banse, Huang, & Page, 2012; Mattys & Wiget, 2011; Paas, Gog, & Sweller, 2010). Considering the limitations of working memory, it makes sense to investigate ways to control and reduce cognitive load in oral communication situations (e.g., in education and instruction, and in the workplace). Research suggests that it is easier to capture and process transient spoken information when it is limited in length and duration, when it is seg­ mented to allow for efficient processing sequences, and when it is accompanied by illustra­ tive motor actions, such as meaningful hand gestures (Fischer & Zwaan, 2008; Singh, Marcus, & Ayres, 2012). While a combination of spoken information and concurring visual information can aid in the processing and retention of spoken information (Kalyuga, 2012; Mayer & Moreno, 2003; van Merrienboer, Kirschner, & Kester, 2003), it can also be detrimental. For example, speakers often believe the duplication of spoken and visual information (via PowerPoint slides, for instance) makes it easier for the audience to process their message. However, exper­ imental research consistently finds that doing so results in cognitive overload for listeners and, as a result, more often than not, leads to a loss of information and significantly impaired retention. This cognitive load is believed to be created by the number of mental operations listeners need to perform when faced with additional incoming information, even if, as in the case of Power Point slides, they find that the two separate sources carry the same content (Kalyuga & Sweller, 2014). Spontaneous, real life discourse is rarely coherent and well‐structured in form and content and, therefore, generates listening challenges, resulting not so much from text difficulty and sophisticated content, but from the communication context and the conversation conventions in which a discourse is embedded (Clark, 1996; Grice, 1975). Considering the complexity of real life communication situations, it is obvious that there is more to listening than simply decoding verbal messages. Organization of information is the necessary step that leads to the construction of a situational model which requires additional processing and abilities, such as perspective taking. Understanding motivation and emotion of those involved in a conversation is also relevant to generating the full picture.

Step 4: Integration of Information Situational models are “representations of what the text is about” (van Oostendorp & Bonebakker, 1999, p. 319). In multi‐level models of text comprehension (see Figure 14.1), they represent the most complex level of text comprehension (Kintsch, 1998; Zwaan & Singer, 2003). The situational model is rich in content, going beyond verbal information, to include inferences, social judgments, and conclusions about appropriate subsequent action and responses.

Psychology 241

Generating Inferences

The listener typically draws on existing knowledge to make necessary inferences from the input that a speaker provides. The engagement with auditory input stimulates either active and intentional inference, or elicits context‐induced passive inference (Cook & O’Brien, 2017; Graesser, Singer, & Trabasso, 1994; Rickheit, Schnotz, & Strohner, 1985). In any case, infer­ ences are necessary to relate distal pieces of information and to connect prior knowledge and expectations with the current input, thus integrating information across time, sources, and mental frames. Research has identified distinct types of inferences instrumental in building the situational model. For semantic inferences, a listener draws on linguistic rules present in the lexical, grammatical, and pragmatic system of a language (Rickheit et al., 1985). A listener typically has no problem inferring the agent of a sentence when pronouns are used. When a listener hears: 1. “A group of tourists was missing in the mountains,” followed by: 2. “They were last seen early in the morning when they left the cottage…” the English speaking listener would not fail to identify they in utterance (2) with a group of tourists in utterance (1). Knowing the pragmatics of language also helps the listener to under­ stand that a total disaster in the kitchen leaves most people alive and that an expression like: “Peter had reached boiling point” (Aitchison, 2003, p. 167) still does not lead a listener to believe that someone has evaporated as long as the listener is able to understand metaphors and linguistic conventions of a specific language (Aitchison, 2003). Bridging inferences go a step further and insert missing information from world knowledge, common sense, and other sources to make the utterance meaningful in the real world. Thus, when explicit information is missing in an utterance, the listener can still generate a coherent situational model by filling the gaps. Upon hearing: 1. “Joanna was at the beach,” 2. “She stepped on broken glass,” and, 3. “She had to go to the hospital,” the listener then creates the image that Joanna must have been walking on the beach with bare feet and was injured after stepping on the broken glass (see, Bishop, 1997). As it is most com­ pelling to imagine that this was the case, listeners would not be able to verify later if the information was present in the utterance or not. Some speakers might even exploit the mechanism of automatic inferences supplied by the listener. This way, a listener may add a substantial amount of information while the speaker can always contend, “I did not say this!” Here we deal with elaborative inferences. A speaker who says, “Peter does not get drunk every night anymore,” would quite probably rely on the automatic search after meaning (Graesser et  al., 1994) and expect the listener to infer that Peter previously had a drinking problem. Based on this mechanism, a speaker can induce meaning without explicitly expressing it. This assumption is made because (most) listeners infer the emotions and motivational states from the actions and verbal behavior of others (Straube, Mothes‐Lasch, & Miltner, 2011).

Theory of Mind

Theory of mind refers to the ability to routinely interpret the minds of others. It is founded on our personal experiences, sensations, and behavior as well as our experience with others. Theory of mind is crucial for social understanding, social behavior, and interpersonal communication

242 Imhof (Dore, Amendum, Golinkoff, & Hirsh‐Pasek, 2018; Friston & Frith, 2015; Osterhaus, Koerber & Sodian, 2016). Within this framework, predictive or forward inferences occur (Murray, Klin, & Myers, 1993) and support the smooth integration of new information into the situational model (Kurby & Zacks, 2012; Zwaan & Madden, 2004). In summary, listeners integrate information from various sources, generate additional information through inference‐making, and, subsequently, determine what an appropriate response would be. The research challenges in the area of integrating information in a listening situation are especially prominent in the choice of experimental material. The construction of situation models from language input has largely been investigated using reading material (e.g., Eerland, Engelen & Zwaan, 2013; Kintsch, 1998; Kurby & Zacks, 2012; Murray, Klin & Myers, 1993) while experiments that include listening to coherent speech are still few and far between (for exceptions see Massaro & Simpson, 2014; Rickheit, Strohner, Müsseler, & Nattkemper, 1987). Current methodological trends (e.g., the use of fMRI, Event‐related Potential (ERP) studies, and experiments using headphones with head‐related transfer functions) should allow for more sophisticated experimental paradigms which eventually lead to a deeper understanding of the cognitive processes specifically involved in acoustic perception and oral speech processing.

Part II: Listening and Individual Differences Although the cognitive processes involved in listening are supposed to be part of a general cognitive system, listening is susceptible to individual differences. Stereotypes that “men don’t listen” or even “men can’t listen,” suggest gender differences. However, with the exception of women’s reactions to infant cries, research does not support the claim that women are better listeners than men (Bornstein et  al., 2017; Dhatri, Gnanateja, Kumar & Maruthy, 2018; Messina et al., 2015). While researchers have examined a number of individual differences in their studies of listening processes and behaviors, I focus on three prominent areas: personality and listening styles, cognitive ability, and age.

Personality and Listening Behavior The personality construct comprises individual characteristics observed to be stable over time and across situations. Descriptors of personality are reflective both of dispositions and actual behavioral patterns. Due to the relative stability of personality features, it is reasonable to assume that the related dispositions and habits have an impact on communication, and by extension, on listening behavior. Presumably, people who enjoy talking might be less enthusiastic listeners, or people with more openness might embrace different perspectives more fully than others. The Big Five model of psychology proposes that personality can be captured in terms of five dimensions: ●● ●● ●●

●● ●●

agreeableness (being helpful, modest, compassionate vs. competitive, selfish), conscientiousness (being reliable, structured, attentive to detail vs. careless, spontaneous), emotional stability/neuroticism (being emotionally stable, well‐adjusted, controlled vs. anx­ ious, low in self‐esteem, self‐conscious), extraversion (being sociable, talkative, friendly vs. socially passive, silent), and openness (being curious, experimental, artistic vs. self‐contained, pragmatic) (Costa & McCrae, 1992).

Individuals differ in the degree to which each dimension contributes to their personality. From previous research, the Big Five have emerged as consistent predictors for professional and social success, mental health, and other outcome criteria (for review see Marsh, Trautwein,

Psychology 243 Lüdtke, Köller & Baumert, 2006; Poropat, 2009), so that it seems to be a valid research question to study its relationship with listening behavior. The research on how personality traits impact listening, however, has yielded mixed results. This is due to a variety of factors, including: (i) inconsistences in how personality and listening constructs have been defined and measured; (ii) the reliance on convenience samples recruited from undergraduate communica­ tion classes; and (iii) the use of measures (particularly early listening measures) with question­ able reliability and validity portfolios; lastly, pertaining studies frequently administer simple correlational designs and rely heavily if not exclusively on self‐report data (Keaton & Bodie, 2013). While studies collecting data from multiple perspectives seem to support the assump­ tion that communication behavior was related to personality (Sharma, Elfenbein, Foster & Bottom, 2018), the need persists to investigate this relationship for listening in more detail. Individual differences related to listening have been conceptualized as Listening Styles which were originally proposed by Watson, Barker, and Weaver (1995) and later refined and updated by Bodie and Worthington (2010); see also Bodie, Worthington, & Gearhart (2013). Listening Styles refer to habitual listener preferences for specific aspects in the communication, e.g., for the people involved, for the time spent, for the content, and the subsequent action. Research has not conclusively determined if listening styles can be considered trait character­ istics or if they represent patterns of behavior that are adjustable to the goal and the topic of a communication situation (Imhof, 2004; Keaton, Keteyian, & Bodie, 2014).

Cognitive Ability and Listening As suggested by the model presented in Figure 14.1, working memory plays an important role in facilitating effective listening in at least two ways. First, working memory monitors the selection phase (speech segregation, attention allocation, and attention switching), and sec­ ond, working memory monitors the organization of information (the rehearsal of relevant speech signals to create a workable text representation). The contribution of working memory to the process and product of listening is quite substantial, and individual differences in working memory capacity should result in differences in listening efficiency. An early review of experimental studies found support for claims that working memory capacity predicts listening and reading comprehension (Daneman & Merikle, 1996). While impaired reading and listening abilities are frequently associated with lower working memory capacity (Alloway & Gathercole, 2005; Cain, Oakhill, & Lemmon, 2004; Florit, Roch, Altoè, & Levorato, 2009), it is still unclear which components of working memory are affected and what role distraction control may play in this context (Beaman, 2004; Berti & Schröger, 2003). In addition to working memory per se, individual differences have been detected in more complex cognitive patterns. Denham et  al. (2014), using an experimental task requiring ­participants to identify a coherent auditory stream embedded in a complex auditory scene (as in listening to a speaker in a busy cafeteria), found stable individual differences in the ability to detect acoustic patterns and to switch between different ways of perceptual organization (i.e., between acoustic streams which may or may not involve language). Janusik (2004) extended the concept of working memory to conversational listening span. In her study, she found that the ability to handle the dynamic and distributed information from an interactive conversation predicts the perceived communicative competence as rated by a communication partner.

Age: Listening Across the Life Span Listening across the life span has been investigated from a variety of perspectives, ranging from infancy through old age. The following section highlights experimental research that investigated

244 Imhof age‐related differences concerning listening (also see Altvater‐Mackensen, this volume, to learn more about listening and language development of infants.) Age‐related hearing loss is a common experience, and the question is how listening is affected. When older adults in the age range between 65 and 75 years of age are tested against younger adults in the age range of 25 through 35, the pattern of results revealed specific impairments related to age. Passow et al. (2012) studied participants in situations where they had to monitor attentional control in a listening situation with multiple sources. Participants with normal hearing ability were instructed to attend to one ear, to ignore competing stimuli in spite of their intensity, and to switch attention from one ear to the other as instructed. Stimuli were paired recordings of voiceless (/pa/, /ta/, /ka/) and voiced (/ba/, /da/, /ga/) stop consonants. The experimental task was to press the responding key for the consonant that could be identified at the attended ear. Some pairs, such as /pa/–/ba/, presumably contained more challenging combinations of stimuli than others, such as /pa/–/da/. As it turned out, older adults had more difficulty sustaining the attentional focus than younger adults, they had more trouble identifying the targets in challenging situations, and more difficultly intentionally switching attention from one ear to the other. The authors demonstrated that the impairment difficulties older adults experienced stemmed from weaker attentional control (i.e., reduced flexibility and inhibition of salient stimuli). This effect was even more pronounced in experiments in which speech stimuli were used (Oberem, Koch, & Fels, 2017). Notably, the effect of inefficient attentional control found in older adults was ­mirrored in the findings for younger children (7–8 years), but not for older children (11–12 years). These results suggest that younger and older listeners are substantially challenged in situations with multiple acoustic sources. It is quite likely that these challenges would result in poorer speech identification performance (Passow et al., 2013). Similarly, other empirical evidence suggests that automatic processes in sound segregation and auditory scene analysis tend to be impaired in old age (Dinces & Sussman, 2017). Translated to daily life, these results imply that young children and older adults struggle harder to attend to one speaker in a multi‐talker situation and have greater difficulty to both wall out distractions and to maintain an attentional focus. A comparable age effect was found in studies examining irrelevant or interfering sound (i.e., sound or speech that should not be attended to). Examining the irrelevant speech effect (ISE), Elliott (2002) instructed participants of different age groups from childhood through adult­ hood to perform a visual span task, while manipulating the sound condition in the background (i.e., playing random words/tones and pitting these against silence). The younger the partic­ ipants, the greater the detrimental effect of irrelevant sound on the visual task. Results from additional studies suggest that this effect might be due to weak or not yet fully developed attentional abilities (Klatte, Lachmann, Schlittmeier & Hellbrück, 2010; Meinhardt‐Injac et al., 2015). Additional age effects on listening have been reported for higher‐order processing of acoustic input. The way in which listeners process information to build a situational model changes across the life span (Wannagat, Waizenegger, & Nieding, 2017). Reflecting other developmental changes in cognitive processes, from concrete to more abstract thinking abilities, pre‐school children up to the age of eight years benefit from concurrent auditory and pictorial information as they store and retrieve information. From about ten years on, the quality of situation models no longer benefits from additional pictorial information which is provided along with the auditory input. In summary, age differences in listening can be accounted for both in terms of changes in attentional capacity and attentional control, and in the cognitive processes pertaining to mental structure building.

Psychology 245

Conclusion From the perspective of psychology, listening is both a relevant and a challenging subject. Listening research necessarily investigates both overt behavior and mental processes and requires that methods be adjusted to situational context. While early researchers often gener­ alized findings from reading research to listening (because it was language, after all), today researchers understand that listening is a complex process with its own set features and processes. Current studies utilize innovative and creative methods with methodological approaches to listening research increasingly taking advantage of neuropsychological mea­ sures, such as electroencephalogram (EEG), and fMRI to detect neural correlates and neural networks which pertain to listening (see Teubner‐Rhodes & Kuchinsky, this volume). Taken together, the various contributions from psychology to listening research have advanced the field. The challenge is now to critically integrate the findings into listening theory building and to identify future perspectives for the practice and research of listening.

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Sound Studies Matt Brounley

While listening may certainly be abstracted and disambiguated to encompass many different human experiences, all acts of listening entail some human relationship with sound. Sound, which David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (2015, p. 2) defined as “vibration that is perceived and becomes known through its materiality,” has long been a vexing object of study for scholars across the humanities. Sound is material, yet often seems to defy clear description. Think of the tired philosophical maxim: When a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound? The question calls attention to the fact that sound straddles the ontological line between a material object in space and the experienced phenomenon. While listening is a primary way that humans experience sound, there are innumerable other ways that sound moves and affects bodies in space. Sound studies is a disciplinary home for those who want to consider the sonic world without necessarily privileging one mode of experience over another. Put simply, sound studies is an interdisciplinary academic genre that deals with sound from numerous perspectives. Unlike disciplines like anthropology which are united by common methods or those like musicology which are united by a specific object of study, attempts to define sound studies necessarily celebrate the breadth of topics and multitudinous approaches employed by its practitioners. Jonathan Sterne (2012), the field’s most recognized voice, has described sound studies as less of a centralized discipline and more of an “interdisciplinary ferment that takes sound as its analytical point of departure or arrival” (p. 2). Sterne (2012) points out that many “sound students” – his term for sound studies practitioners – also find homes in history, philosophy, musicology, and a host of other disciplines. He presents the goals, objectives, and methods of sound studies broadly, leaving room for scholars to employ different methods in pursuit of sound. At this point, some writers would highlight the field’s novelty, accentuating the fact that it is still in exciting, but nascent, stages of development. Many descriptions of sound studies on university websites and in other readers like this one begin with this hedge. For instance, the American Anthropological Association’s “Music and Sound Interest Group” website reads that the “emerging field of sound studies, represents an increasing number of social‐science‐ related works on music and sound” even as the study group itself celebrates its ten year anniversary (About MSIG, n.d.). Because of the open‐ended nature of sound studies’ starting point, to many outside observers it may seem like an interdisciplinary antagonist. While most sound students would not define The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

254 Brounley their field solely in terms of responses to previous academic trends, the dedication to interdisciplinarity that is found in much of the work does seem to contain an energy of rebellion. There is a sense of forging a new ground that cuts through institutional divides, through long staid scholarly understandings of what sound and listening can be, and through scholarship across a wide range of fields that have laid claim to sonic experience. This is exactly why media theorist Michele Hilmes (2005) wrote that sound studies may be doomed to be “always emerging, never emerged” (p. 249), arguing that the perpetual feeling of novelty surrounding sound studies was baked into the field’s identity and not necessarily just because it was, at that time, rather new to the scene. Despite scholarly arguments on whether sound studies has, or ever will, “fully emerge,” it has clearly become an accepted discipline in the Western academic establishment. For example, Northwestern University, Universität der Künste Berline, and Goldsmiths all offer dedicated master’s degree programs in sound art and studies. New York University offers a PhD in Media, Culture, and Communication with a track in sound studies. Universities around the world sponsor faculty working groups dedicated to sound studies topics, and major scholarly organizations such as the Society for Ethnomusicology, the American Studies Association, and the American Anthropological Association have long hosted sound studies groups and caucuses. Publications of sound studies anthologies, dedicated journals, peer‐reviewed blogs, and book series have surged in the past 10 years, cementing its position as an important and distinct area of scholarly pursuit. In this chapter, I briefly outline some of the goals, methods, and major topics that currently ground sound studies. I offer examples of sound studies scholarship in areas such as soundscapes, technological experience, noise, sonic violence, historical sound studies, and sound studies in non‐Western contexts. I end the chapter with a brief critique of the interdisciplinary identity of sound studies as a field, arguing it is linked with larger trends in humanistic scholarship towards interdisciplinary thinking. I conclude that, while the interdisciplinary focus that is core to sound studies is powerfully generative of new ideas, it is not immune from the pitfalls of interdisciplinary study in the academy including creating hostile divisions between disciplines and being used to justify department closures.

Soundscapes and Auditory Cultures It is difficult to say when sound studies began. We would require clarification on what is meant by sound studies. If the question is whether or not scholars have been “thinking sonically” or writing about sound outside of a music‐based context, the answers are clear: Of course scholarly considerations of sound are not new, as this volume well demonstrates. If, however, the question is when did the tenets and ideas that form the discipline now known as sound studies begin to emerge, we can more accurately locate some key, influential writings. Some of the earliest glimmerings of sound studies began with attempts to understand the complex soundings of urban spaces in the twentieth century. Best known of these writers is Canadian composer and theorist R. Murray Schafer, who explores sounds in urban space and formalized a concept, called the “soundscape.” For Schafer, the soundscape is a holistic social concept describing the comprised interactions of many sonic elements of a given space. The concept first appeared in his 1977 book The Tuning of the World, which borrows its title from late sixteenth‐century Hermitic philosopher Robert Fludd’s conception of the earth as an instrument played by god. Schafer (1994) seeks for a way to “find the secret of that tuning,” employing the metaphor of an orchestra, aiming to instruct the public on techniques for appreciating the soundings of the world around them, and, thereby, eliminating sounds considered noisy or pollutive (p. 6). His ecocriticism both allegorizes the soundscape as a meta‐ historical concept infringed upon by humans, as well as considering the soundscape as a literal sound within present space.



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Schafer’s writings are charged with an apocalyptic urgency, describing a soundscape that is chaotically changing as new technologies invade the spaces between humans and nature. His position is clear – he seeks to listen to the world as if it were in the process of performing a symphony, casting the natural past as harmonious and the mechanical future as dissonant and “schizophonic” (Schafer, 1994, p. 24). For this reason, his writings have been criticized as forcing the multitudinous soundings of the world under a logocentric lens. Indeed, at times Schafer listens for what Marie Thompson (2017) calls “aesthetic moralism” in the sounds of everyday life. Rather than listening to sounds themselves, this perspective paints the world of sound as an ethical field in which any kind of noise is undesirable and the ecological sonic ideal is silent and pure. Despite this, the core ideas of Schafer’s soundscapes helped give rise to what becomes sound studies. But the concept is often treated with suspicion. As Ari Kelman (2010) wrote, it has “come to refer to almost any experience of sound in almost any context” (p. 214). Kelman claims that when the term “soundscapes” is used today, it often merely links sound to place, side‐stepping Schafer’s larger theory of soundscapes as a generalized historical concept. Kelman provides examples of authors who have made sincere attempts to work with Schafer’s theories, but concludes that “in each case, Schafer’s notion of the soundscape recedes in favor of each author’s reassessment of its use, meaning, and context. Each one of these authors takes Schafer seriously, but in order to make his term work analytically, they have to reformulate it almost entirely” (p. 226). In fact, the social lacuna in Schafer’s original text may have ended up becoming its most lasting legacy, as authors continue to work with the concept of sonic ecologies and fill in the gaps. For instance, soundscapes have proven to be creative and insightful heuristics in sound studies readings of the past. Alain Corbin’s influential 1998 study of the sonic rhythms of nineteenth‐century life intricately used a concept very similar to soundscapes. Corbin calls them “aural landscapes” to describe the semiotics of bells in French villages. By following the social lives of these bells, from their usage for cross village communication to their decline as amplification technologies became more available, Corbin demonstrates how changes in political and religious structures resonated, literally, with the sounds of everyday life. According to Kelman (2010), there are important differences in his approach from Schafer’s. He argues that Corbin “dismisses Schafer’s dystopian historiography and instead amplifies the complicated reverberations between sonic phenomena and social anxieties” (p. 226). Even so, Corbin’s work would prove to be a key text for future sound students. Like Corbin, other scholars have drawn upon the soundscape concept in attempts to ­understand, and in some cases reconstruct, the sonic past. Emily Thompson has been at the forefront of this trend, collecting archival recordings and attempting to reproduce historical soundscapes in New York City. One such project, “The Roaring Twenties,” documents noise complaints through interactive features on a map, where users can click and hear archival recordings (Thompson, 2013). In her opening remarks to the “The Roaring Twenties,” Thompson explained that: the aim here is not just to present sonic content, but to evoke the original contexts of those sounds, to help us better understand that context as well as the sounds themselves. The goal is to recover the meaning of sound, to undertake a historicized mode of listening that tunes our modern ears to the pitch of the past.

Thompson’s book, Soundscapes of Modernity, is consistently hailed as one of sound studies’ foundational texts, detailing the aural landscape of early twentieth‐century New York. Bringing together studies of symphony hall design, noise abatement policies, and technological developments in recording, Thompson’s (2002) goal is to “restore the aural dimension of modernity” in order to “provide a means by which to understand, more generally and significantly,

256 Brounley the role of technology in the construction of culture” (p. 11). Her work greatly expands the potential of the soundscape concept and weaves together many themes that, in 2002, were still coalescing into sound studies: attention to sonic environments, technological mediation, and sonic experience.

Sound and Technology In the decades after Schafer, there were many more scholars who wrote about the shifting relationships between humans, technologies, and the worlds of sound that exist between them. Sound studies was on the horizon, though it had not yet had its call to arms. Still, auditory culture studies began to emerge in the 1980s and 1990s, many of which like contemporary sound studies research, included representatives from musicology, sociology, and philosophy. Technology and sonic consumer cultures were major themes for this generation of scholars who were living through periods of rapid technological change. Shuhei Hosokawa’s (1984) article, “The Walkman Effect,” analyzes portable music players and their listeners’ relationship with the urban environment. Published only five years after the Sony Walkman first came to market, Hosokawa explores the solipsistic aural environment the device offers. Putting on headphones and walking around the city, Hosokawa claims turns the urban environment into a “secret theatre” (p.177). In contrast to Schafer’s dream of an urban soundscape filled with “familiar and known noises,” Hosokawa, following Deleuze and Guattari, says Walkman listening is “deterritorialized” as it “intends that every sort of familiar soundscape is transformed by that singular acoustic experience coordinated by the user’s own ongoing pedestrian act” (p. 175). From the 1990s and early 2000s, audio culture studies became increasingly popular in journals across musicology, sociology, and philosophy, but still lacked a sense of disciplinary home. Michael Bull (2005) wrote for media studies platforms about the cultural ramifications of the iPod and sound consumption culture more broadly, saying the device allows listeners to “create spaces of freedom through the very use of technologies that tie them into consumer culture” (p. 346; see also Lacey, this volume). Kier Keightley (1996) analyzed mid‐century Hi‐Fi technology in Popular Music, figuring it as “masculine technology that permits virtual escape from domestic space” (p. 150). Pauline Oliveros (2007) wrote for art music journals like American Music about the technologically mediated soundscape of American music, where, among other things, she asked if internet video conferencing is changing the ways composers, musicians, and listeners negotiate a sense of national musical space (p. 398). Even though these authors operated, at the time, in disparate fields, all these works have become foundational readings in sound studies and are included, in some form, in nearly every compendium of influential texts.

Film Studies A loose coalescence around sonic themes in audio‐culture studies and ecocriticism had begun to emerge by the 1990s, but events and books dedicated to sound culture were still relatively few and far between. At the same time, in film studies, sound became a widely theorized topic. Michael Chion’s (1994) book, Audio‐Vision: Sound on Screen, offers a specific theorization of filmic experience of sound in three modes of listening: casual listening, semantic listening, and reduced listening. His vocabulary for describing the relations between sound and image on film would very quickly become wrapped into the essential vocabulary for film scholarship. But it is Chion’s concept of “reduced listening” that has been the most far‐reaching and influential on sound studies scholarship. Drawing from Pierre Schaffer’s descriptions of his musique concrète, Chion (1994, p. 28) describes reduced listening as a “new, fruitful, and hardly natural” enterprise that highlights, rather than disguises, film’s capability to divorce



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sounds from their sources, and, therefore, allow the viewer/listener to experience the sounds as such. Chion expresses great potential in this “acousmatic dimension,” claiming that “the acousmatic truly allows sound to reveal itself in all its dimensions” (p. 30). Chion’s attention to sound in film reads like a call for a new type of study focused on intersections between recording technology, film, and sound. Although no one would yet be calling this sound studies, they soon would be. Film scholar Rick Altman is often cited as one of the first scholars to publicly call for sound studies as a distinct discipline. As early as 1980, Altman had edited an edition of the Yale French Review that focused entirely on sound in film. Altman’s work on sound chiefly concerns the structure of film spectatorship. Altman places sound at the center of the viewing experience, saying all film relies on a process of what he called the “sound hermeneutic,” defining it as “a process…whereby the sound asks where? And the image responds here!” (Altman, 1980, p. 74). In later work, Altman advocates for studying sound apart from film, and, in a 1999 article in Iris, he all but declares himself the founder of sound studies, dating its conception to his work with the Yale French Review in 1980 and refers to himself and his contemporaries as the “fourth generation of sound studies.” For the most part, discussions of sound in late twentieth‐century film studies centers around the connection between sight and sound, paying particular attention to the listener’s ­perception of sound and source. Chion’s (1994) terms for sounds divorced from sources  –  “reduced listening” and “acousmatic” experience – have become commonplace across sound studies, and there have been recent attempts to unpack them even further outside of filmic contexts. Brian Kane is most notable for his work on acousmatic experience, and his work Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (2014) has fast become an essential text for those interested in sound studies and the philosophy of listening. Drawing from Chion’s original usage of the term “acousmetre,” Kane (2014) made clear that acousmatic experience is of great epistemological concern, writing: “acousmaticity, the determination or degree of spacing between source, cause, and effect, depends on the cognitive state of the listener and the knowledge they possess about the sound being heard, its environmental situation, and its means of production, among many factors” (p. 292). By including case studies of Les Paul’s multitrack guitar music and Kafka’s tale, “The Burrow,” Kane demonstrated that the kinds of questions generated a decade earlier in film studies can still instruct readings of many different types of sonic objects. Interestingly, Kane (2014) does not fully locate his work within sound studies, reasoning that there is an “unfortunate line that is often drawn between music studies and sound studies – a line that I hope this book goes some distance to erase” (p. 226). He posited that his studies of “acousmatic sound” require too much interdisciplinarity to fit into any category, even sound studies. Kane (2014) continues by arguing that the study of sound should move through disciplines just as sound moves through physical boundaries like borders, walls, and bodies, saying, “Acousmatic sound gathers them together – music studies, sound studies, philosophy, literature, film, and psychoanalysis – with a sublime indifference to disciplinary propriety. Sound respects no boundaries, and neither does sound unseen” (p. 226).

Global Sound Studies Kane’s justification for a non‐disciplinary approach to sound is found in many attempts to distinguish the field. But the fact of the matter is that scholarship cannot move across boundaries of discipline, culture, race, and gender without first reckoning with the hegemonies that entrench it. Despite declamations of sound studies’ far reach and potential, the vast majority of scholarship centers on North American or European case studies and relies on the Western scholarly canon for foundational theories. The last decade has, however, seen significant

258 Brounley attempts at calling attention to disrupt this Eurocentrism. In a recently edited volume, Steingo and Sykes (2019) outlines both the inherent biases of sound studies and the potential to move beyond them. In an early version of their introduction to Remapping Sound Studies, Steingo and Sykes (2017) writes that while sound studies should be commended for unearthing “repressed histories of sound and listening, which situate the ear as a major instrument in the production of social, cultural, and scientific knowledge,” there is a demonstrable lack of sound studies scholarship that extends outside “Northern‐centric perspectives.” They suggest this may be due to the early emphasis placed on technological innovation, and they challenge modern scholars to “remap” the field by focusing sound studies towards projects of decolonization and the concerns of the global South. While Steingo and Sykes’ critique is timely and necessary, the authors are also careful to recognize that a number of scholars laid important ground work for thinking about sound outside of the comfort of Western, technologically mediated experiences. Anthropologist Charles Hirschkind (2006), an early adopter of sound studies methods, applied the concept of soundscapes in his analysis of Egyptian cassette sermon culture. In contemporary ethnomusicology, the branch of music studies that chiefly concerns itself with the ethnographic study of non‐ Western music, sound studies has become an indispensable analytic toolkit. Steingo (2015), for instance, analyzes the physical barriers of Johannesburg and sound’s impeded movement, while Tausig (2019) takes a sound studies approach in his exploration of the sonic performances of Red Shirt protesters in Thailand. It seems that many scholars are answering the call to “radically decenter” sound studies, actively exploring how the discipline might change (see also Dutta, this volume).

Noise and Politics Perhaps more than any other topic, noise has been a central concern of sound students. It is easy to imagine why: Along with music, noise is perhaps the most commonly talked about sonic experience. It is also a polarizing topic, eliciting celebration or disgust depending on one’s perspective. Noise is a regulative boundary of sound – a concept used to mark the limits of sonic meaning and social appropriateness. Therefore, usages of noise, read as a purposeful destabilization of ordered sound, are often read as acts of politics. Even a cursory survey of library shelves and film documentaries reveals that noise has been a scholarly topic since the turn of the twenty‐first century. Marie Thompson, author of Beyond Unwanted Sound, presents an excellent and exhaustive overview of recent noise scholarship, concluding that the 2010s witnessed “something of a noise revival” (Thompson, 2017, p. 4). To give only a few examples, Hillel Schwartz’s (2011) epic Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang to Beyond uses noise and noisiness as a central heuristic for exploring a range of human activity through the ages, while David Novak’s (2013) Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation paints vivid pictures of specific noise musicians in Japan, exploring the political connotations of their aesthetic practice. In 1977, the same year that Schafer published Tuning the World, economist Jacques Attali published Noise: The Political Economy of Music. While the book is principally concerned with practices of music listening, collecting, and composition, it has proven an essential text for sound students interested in talking about noise in both musical and non‐musical contexts. Attali (1977) considered noise to be a basic sonic unit without which “nothing essential ­happens” (p. 2) and music as “the organization of noise” precipitates into societal organization (p. 4). In short, Attali inverts classical Marxist divisions between base and superstructure, claiming that the super structural element of music is prophetic to social change. Attali’s equation of noise to chaos, music to organization, and his claim that changes in musical thinking can speak to, and even portend, changes in economic structure heightens the



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stakes for noise scholarship. For some, Attali’s definition is far too totalizing. Drott (2015) questions the book’s insistence that musical development can mirror socio‐economic ­conditions, writing, “for all its suasive power, for all the anecdotal evidence that Attali accumulates in its pages, the book never fully spells out the mechanisms by which music performs this prophetic function” (p. 725). For others, Attali’s take is too musical. James (2014), reading Foucault through Attali, suggests that contemporary neoliberal capitalism, “uses the laws of acoustics as the mode of capitalist production in general” (p. 140). Either way, there is a clear urgency to understanding the noise/music dialectic. Treatment of noise in sound studies varies greatly. Some authors, such as Marie Thompson and Greg Hainge, are interested in the philosophical boundaries of noise, searching for a way to describe it outside of being a purely relational concept. Thompson (2017), for instance, draws on affect theory to “recognize noise as a perturbing force‐relation that, for better or for worse, induces a change” rather than “characterizing noise as a type of sound or a value judgement that is made of sound” as she argued most noise scholarship does (p. 42). Hainge’s (2013) ontology of noise searches for a similarly materialist definition of noise. Following Deleuze’s inversion of difference to be a productive rather than reductive force, Hainge ­highlights the fact that noise is constitutive to all sound. Other noise scholars examine the aesthetics of noise and the politics of creating noise. This scholarly lineage often begins with Italian futurist Luigi Russolo’s 1913 manifesto and taxonomy of industrial sound The Art of Noises (Russolo, 1916/1986). Russolo’s insistence that music should reflect and celebrate the sounds of industrial modernity has fascinated noise scholars for years as one of the earliest published arguments for aestheticizing noise.

Sonic Violence The materiality of sound affects human bodies in ways that conventional understandings of sonic experience have difficulty accounting for. Sound, put simply, is vibrational energy traveling through air and fully capable of causing injury and harm to bodies. Sound can become weaponized as both a psychologically damaging agent and a brutal acoustic force capable of causing hearing loss, tissue damage, and even death. The advancement and deployment of sonic weapons around the world has increased significantly since the beginning of America’s global war on terror in 2002 and the institution of its “no‐touch torture” policies in enemy interrogation. Musicologist Suzanne Cusick (2013) unravels the effects of these sound‐based torture ­practices based on the accounts of former prisoners of American authorities. The prisoners described sonic torture methods that incorporated constant abrasive music, continuous whispered harassment from hidden speakers in cells, and, as one of her interlocutors described “excruciatingly loud, aggressive, intrusive, annoying sounds” (p. 286). Cusick develops ­ethnomusicologist Steven Feld’s concept of “acoustemology” to explain the intent and brutal effects of the sonic torture methods, which were all deemed “non‐lethal” by the American government. According to Feld (2015), acoustemology “joins acoustics to epistemology to investigate sounding and listening as a knowing‐in‐action: a knowing‐with and knowing‐ through the audible” (p. 12). Cusick (2013) practices an acoustemological approach by demonstrating the effect of sound in turning “space into place” and detailing, through her interviews with prisoners, the severe psychological consequences when sound is weaponized specifically to rupture a subject’s perception of the world (p. 279). Daughtry’s (2015) study of the sounds of war in Iraq is perhaps the most comprehensive sound‐studies work to date on the topic of sonic violence. Drawing from fieldwork embedded with American military units in Iraq, Daughtry systematizes the various modalities of acoustic experience during wartime into a sphere of sounds he referred to as the “bellaphonic” (p. 3).

260 Brounley Listening through the bellaphonic, Daughtry claims, turns all involved into “virtuosic auditors” who understand that “their ability to listen acutely was a skill that increased their likelihood of survival” (p. 67). But sound studies of sonic violence are not restricted to studies of wartime. The most widely used sonic weapon is the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) which is primarily used as a crowd dispersal weapon in civilian police forces. Invented in 2000 and achieving notoriety for its use against protestors in Ferguson, Missouri in 2015, the LRAD emits incredibly loud and highly focused sound waves towards large groups of people. Devices can be small enough to be worn as a body pack or large enough to be mounted to a truck, and they can generate sounds capable of causing permanent hearing damage at close range. Scholar‐Activist Daphne Carr (2017) includes studies of the LRAD as part of a larger category of what she labeled “police sound,” encompassing whistles, sirens, megaphones, overhead helicopters, and legislative technologies such as noise ordinances. Her research highlights how sound is often used by the police as a “tactic of intimidation” and details its potential to cause serious psychological effects even in instances when it is not causing bodily harm. Steve Goodman (2010) analyzes the effect of intimidating sounds and proposed the concept of “bass materialism” to account for the “sonic ecology of dread” sound is capable of engendering (p. 29). For Goodman, sonic violence is not limited to affect just the ears or the mind. Instead, its vibrational ontology that exists “in excess and autonomous from the presence of a human” is perfectly capable of exerting extreme violence on the world and on bodies (p. 9).

Concluding Thoughts: Potential Pitfalls of Interdisciplinarity This chapter has reviewed some of the major trends and scholarly focuses of sound studies and has summarized several tenets that ground the field. It bears repeating that sound studies is an interdisciplinary field of study and that methodological pliability is a core tenet described by any author who ventures to define its boundaries. Despite the resistance to fit it into conventional scholarly categories, sound studies has exploded in Western academic circles in the past 20 years. It is worth asking, then, why has sound studies become so popular? While the answers may be uncomfortable, it is important to recognize circumstances which catalyzed its rise in Western academic circles. In her 2002 book, Traveling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide, narratologist Mieke Bal offers a critique of cultural studies that might well be applied to sound studies. Cultural studies, like sound studies, is a field that defines itself primarily by its object and celebrates the fact that methods are pliant and unlimited. Bal (2002) described the value of such an approach, claiming that “by challenging methodological dogma, and elitist prejudice and value judgement, cultural studies has been uniquely instrumental in at least making the academic community aware of the conservative nature of its endeavors” (p. 6). This statement resonates with the ways sound studies has been lauded for destabilizing disciplinary boundaries when dealing with sound. But Bal is far from myopically celebratory of cultural studies. She devotes much of the book describing the “unforeseeable difficulties and hardships” that followed cultural studies. But these hardships also contributed to the success of cultural studies. Bal (2002) states that “cultural studies’ major innovation has been to pay attention to a different kind of object… more often than not, the methods have not changed” (p. 7). Her statement mirrors much of the literature I have reviewed as I have attempted to “define” sound studies. Bal voiced concern of this hesitance to coherent methods, claiming that as concepts “travel” between disciplines they risk losing their critical sharpness – an issue that some believe applies to the sound studies discipline. Kane (2016) has recently aimed this critique at new materialist trends (Goodman, 2010; Hainge, 2013; Cox, 2011) in sound studies, claiming that the concepts do



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not transfer well to an audio‐cultural frame. Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s (2016) book The Sonic Color Line: Race and The Cultural Politics of Listening argues that the field can rearticulate white, male historiographies and requires a new, decolonizing interdisciplinarity. Bal’s (2002) second critique of cultural studies, which again can be nearly directly applied to sound studies, is that it has “involuntarily ‘helped’ its opponents to deepen rather than overcome the destructive divide between les anciens and les modernes” (p. 7). This is seen in sound studies’ perpetual novelty, continually casting itself as new against the implied older methods of music studies, philosophy, history, and other disciplines. Although the interdisciplinary thinking of sound studies has led to exciting new territory, like Bal’s cultural studies, sound studies persists in widening the gap between itself and other disciplines. I conclude with the third, and probably most concerning, critique Bal provided  –  the economic reality of academia as industry. Fields like “cultural studies” and “sound studies” are an administrator’s dream. Despite the sincere and productive goals that scholars engaged in interdisciplinary scholarship rally behind, it is an unfortunate, if involuntary, fact that interdisciplinary scholarship plays into the neoliberal agenda of universities. To be clear, I am not ascribing the popularity of sound studies solely to administrator’s preferences. What I do contend, however, is that sound studies’ rise to academic recognition has coincided closely with many university initiatives stressing budget consolidation, corporate streamlining, and reorganization. A sound student can, by nature of their discipline, take classes in a variety of departments; and as universities become more business minded, it represents a “sound” investment against full departments for music or anthropology. As sound studies grows and extends its reach into more academic departments, it will be necessary to monitor the university industry’s reaction. We may potentially find ourselves arguing for a distinct discipline, while also against the kinds of damaging program closures and combinations that Bal argued have happened in Gender Studies, due, in part, to the interdisciplinary breadth of cultural studies.

References About MSIG (n.d.). Music and Sound Interest Group of the American Anthropological Association. Retrieved from http://msig.americananthro.org/about‐msig/ Altman, R. (1980). Moving lips: Cinema as ventriloquism. Yale French Studies, 60, 67–79. https://doi. org/10.2307/2930005 Altman, R. (1999). The state of sound studies. Iris, 27, 3–4. Attali, J. (1977). Noise: The political economy of music. (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Bal, M. (2002). Traveling concepts in the humanities: A rough guide. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bull, M. (2005). No dead air! The iPod and the culture of mobile listening. Leisure Studies, 24, 173–190. https://doi.org/10.1080/0261436052000330447 Carr, D. (2017, May 31). Muff the police: Sonic care at demonstrations. [Blog] Retrieved from http:// www.daphnecarr.com/policesound/lrad/ Chion, M. (1994). Audio‐vision: Sound on Screen. (C. Gorbman, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Corbin, A. (1998). Village bells: The culture of the senses in the nineteenth‐century French countryside. New York: Columbia University Press. Cox, C. (2011). Beyond representation and signification: Toward a sonic materialism. Journal of a Visual Culture, 10, 145–161. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412911402880. Cusick, S (2013). Acoustemology of detention in the “global war on terror.” In G. Born (Ed.), Music, sound and space: Transformations of public and private experience (pp. 275–281). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Daughtry, M. (2015). Listening to war: Sound, music, trauma, and survival in wartime Iraq. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

262 Brounley Drott, E. (2015). Rereading Jacques Attali’s Bruits. Critical Inquiry, 41, 721–756. https://doi. org/10.1086/681784 Feld, S. (2015). Acoustemology. In D. Novak & M. Sakakeeny (Eds.), Keywords in sound (pp. 12–21). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Goodman, S. (2010). Sonic warfare: Sound, affect, and the ecology of fear. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hainge, G. (2013). Noise matters: Towards an ontology of noise. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Hilmes, M. (2005). Review: Is there a field called sound culture studies? And does it matter? American Quarterly, 57, 249–259. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40068259 Hirschkind, C. (2006). The ethical soundscape: Cassette sermons and Islamic counterpublics, Cultures of History. New York: Columbia University Press. Hosokawa, S. (1984). The Walkman effect. Popular Music, 165–180. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/853362 James, R. (2014). Neoliberal noise: Attali, Foucault, and the biopolitics of uncool. Culture, Theory, and Critique, 55, 138–158. https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2014.899881 Kane, B. (2014). Sound unseen: Acousmatic sound in theory and practice. New York: Oxford University Press. Kane, B. (2016). Sound studies without auditory culture: A critique of the ontological turn. Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 1, 2–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2015.1079063 Keightley, K. (1996). “Turn It down!” She shrieked: Gender, domestic space, and high fidelity, 1948–59. Popular Music, 15, 149–177. https://www.jstor.org/stable/931216 Kelman, A. (2010). Rethinking the soundscape: A critical genealogy of a key term in sound studies. The Senses and Society, 5, 212–234. https://doi.org/10.2752/174589210X12668381452845 Novak, D. (2013). Japanoise: Music at the edge of circulation. Durham: Duke University Press. Novak, D., & Sakakeeny, M. (2015). Introduction. In D. Novak & M. Sakakeeny (Eds.), Keywords in sound (pp. 1–11). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Oliveros, P. (2007). My “American music”: Soundscape, politics, technology, community. American Music, 25, 389–404. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40071676 Russolo, L. (1986). L’arte dei Rumori (The art of noise) (B. Brown, Trans.). London: Pendragon Press. (Original work published in 1916). Schafer, R. M. (1994). The soundscape: Our sonic environment and the tuning of the world. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books. Schwartz, H. (2011). Making noise: From babel to the big bang and beyond. New York: Zone Books. Steingo, G. (2015). Sound and circulation: Immobility and obduracy in South African electronic music. Ethnomusicology forum, 24,102–123. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17411912.2015.1020823 Steingo, G., & Sykes, J. (2017). Remapping sound studies. Unpublished manuscript. Durham, NC: Duke University. Retrieved from https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/remapping‐sound‐studies/ Steingo, G., & Sykes, J. (2019). Introduction: Remapping sound studies in the global south. In G. Steingo & J. Sykes (Eds.), Remapping sound studies (pp. 1–36). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sterne, J. (2012). Sonic imaginations. In J. Sterne (Ed.), The sound studies reader (pp. 1–17). New York: Routledge. Stoever, J. (2016). The sonic color line: Race and the cultural politics of listening. New York: New York University Press. Tausig, B. (2019). Bangkok is ringing: Sound, protest, and constraint. New York: Oxford University Press. Thompson, E. (2002). The soundscape of modernity: Architectural acoustics and the culture of listening in America, 1900–1933. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Thompson, E. (2013). Author’s statement: The Roaring `Twenties: An interactive exploration of the historical soundscape of New York City. Vectors Journal, 4. Retrieved from http://vectors.usc.edu/ projects/index.php?project=98&thread=AuthorsStatement Thompson, M. (2017). Beyond unwanted sound: Noise, affect, and aesthetic moralism. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

PART III

Teaching Listening

This part contains five chapters that focus on the scholarship of teaching and learning and the challenges educators face as they seek to build listening competency. The section begins with key pedagogic practices for instructors designing listening courses and/or assessing listening skills. Considerations for instructional practices for K‐12 learners as well as adult learners are explored. Examples of these areas of teaching and training are presented in the applied areas of music and medical education.

The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Instructional Design and Assessment Michael Rost

Educational research has consistently shown that many students fall behind in oral ­communication and literacy development because of a lack of listening skills. In the past, the need for listening instruction was frequently characterized in terms of deficiencies: lack of sustained concentration, reluctance to sustain interaction, difficulty in evaluating and recalling critical information, incapacity to integrate ideas, struggles in building knowledge, failure to formulate coherent responses (Marzano, 1991; Alonso, 1996; Gilbert, 1988). More recently, the need for listening pedagogy is characterized in terms of enrichment: enabling learning to explore new meanings, empowering students to make connections, promoting fuller participation and understanding (Concannon‐ Gibney, 2018; Donoghue, 2009). Whether we adopt a remediation framework (in an attempt to “fix” broken skills) or a developmental framework (in an attempt to “add” new skills), there is a need for explicit listening instruction at all levels of education. This chapter offers research‐based approaches to the teaching and assessment of listening in instructional settings. We first review four central principles underlying listening instruction generally, and then examine four listening constructs central to the development of targeted listening skills. Next, listening assessment consistent with these principles is introduced. The chapter ends with directions for additional research.

Pedagogic Principles Listening behavior is exhibited in a range of contexts: social and business, conversational and academic, interpersonal and media‐based, live and distant, individual and group formats, with native languages only, and with second languages involved. Across contexts, however, communication research has revealed some fundamental principles of effective listening that can serve as foundations for listening pedagogy (Bostrom, 2011; Bond, 2012; Caspersz & Stasinska, 2015).

The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Principle One Listening is primarily a skill of actively constructing knowledge rather than of passively receiving and retaining information. This principle positions the listener as central to the communication process: whatever meaning is constructed depends crucially on the listener’s background and experience, as well as on the listener’s expectations, motivations, and mindset during a discourse event, such as a conversation or a lecture (Bergen, 2012; Rost, 2016). The most useful forms of listening instruction and assessment will then focus on the process of how the listener activates background knowledge and experiences the event. Although the outcome of verbal comprehension is important, understanding the process – particularly the decisions the listener makes – is essential for instruction purposes (Evans, 2015).

Principle Two Listening occurs at multiple levels of cognition. The most immediate level addresses personal ­relevance – a fundamental goal of human cognition. A listener’s attention is naturally oriented to assess personal impact of any input event (Wilson & Sperber, 2012). This means that every listener is poised to respond to the question: How does this event (information, experience) impact me at this time? Additional levels of delayed comprehension involve affective discernment (understanding speaker intention), cognitive inference (understanding implications), and social application (calculating a response). These additive levels of comprehension are available to every listener, if given the opportunity and motivation to pursue them (Baggio, 2018). The ability to access these less immediate, more abstract levels of comprehension often ­differentiates successful and unsuccessful listeners in most academic and professional settings. Purposeful listening instruction can guide students in strategies for going deeper into a discourse event, to pursue comprehension more rigorously (Carreker, 2016).

Principle Three Meaning in communicative contexts is co‐created between speaker and listener. Thus, an essential part of listening ability entails initiating purposeful interaction and maintaining empathy and rapport with interlocutors in order to pursue fuller comprehension (Rymes, 2015). Learning to engage others in meaningful interaction, explore one’s own perspective, and deepen understanding also can be modeled and taught through structured practice. Direct instruction in these skills raises learner awareness of the behavioral variables in “active listening” and assists learners in adjusting their attitudes toward becoming more collaborative in interaction (Goh & Burns, 2012).

Principle Four Interpersonal dynamics in listening situations involve an awareness of the listener’s participation rights. In any discourse setting, typically one person will “manage” discourse, guiding topic selection and direction, turn‐taking, as well as rights of listeners to “challenge” speakers’ claims (Kirova, 2015). The “discourse manager” is predictably the person with the highest perceived “status,” a status conferred – whether consciously or unconsciously – by perception of age, gender, race, physical stature, social standing, profession, or cultural status (Heritage & Clayman, 2010). Some listeners – often non‐native speakers with lower “cultural status” in educational settings  –  may lose a feeling of agency, participate less, and therefore receive a diminished form of input and consequently a moderated expectation for comprehension (Ovando & Combs, 2018).



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Culturally sensitive instruction in the area of listening requires continual attention to s­ tandards of equality and inclusiveness. Instructors need to be sure that students, particularly non‐native speakers or speakers of a minority dialect, receive consistent high‐quality instruction and are provided with the same opportunities, and cognitive demands as majority students (Ramirez & Jimenez‐Silva, 2014). These four principles – listening as active construction of knowledge, listening at multiple levels of cognition, listening as co‐creation, listening as participation – can be used as g ­ uidelines for developing instructional activities and assessments.

Teaching Approaches The teaching of listening in classroom settings involves regulation of several instructional ­variables. One set of variables involves input: the amount of oral language students are exposed to, the types of listening input they are exposed to (i.e., teacher/peer talk, media), and the degree of complexity of the input they are expected to understand (i.e., the import of issues, sophistication of the ideas) Another set addresses the type and level of intervention that teachers choose to use (i.e., specific tasks accompanying listening, means of checking student understanding and providing feedback, construction of peer interactions following the listening activity). Four broad approaches for teaching listening in educational settings will be outlined.

Comprehension Building Comprehension building refers to a style of systematic intervention by the teacher to lead students toward deeper levels of understanding of what they hear and read. It focuses on listeners as active constructors of meaning with the goal of involving them in the understanding process. Early research on reading and listening comprehension instruction centered around ­techniques that teachers could use to encourage students to approach a text in ways that promote more complete comprehension (see Flavell, 1979 for a review). These techniques have evolved over time into pedagogic approaches placing the listener as “agent” in a comprehension building process, and recruiting complementary forms of cognitive processing. One early model called Experience‐Text‐Relationship (ETR) method valued identifying text cues that triggered connections to the listener’s/reader’s personal experience and background knowledge (Au, 1979). Teachers use classroom discussion to guide students systematically through the cognitive processes related to understanding an extended text – thereby increasing their engagement, understanding, and enjoyment of the experience. The “K‐W‐L” model (what you “know already,” “want to know,” and “learned” from the text), focused on orienting students to the kind of active thinking required to comprehend challenging texts (Carr & Ogle, 1987). This method was proposed as an antidote to excessive teacher‐led questioning, aiming to allow students to assume more “agency” as listeners and readers (Walsh & Sattes, 2017). “Reciprocal Teaching” (RT) encouraged comprehension building through cycles of student‐ led questioning. Questioning cycles focus on four comprehension strategies: predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing (Palinscar & Brown, 1984). Using the RT approach, students work in a small group with a relatively lengthy text – typically a story involving an unusual problem and a solution. Toward the end of the activity, the students try to clarify ­difficult words or phrases, as vocabulary knowledge underpins comprehension (Kim & Phillips, 2014). Clarifying builds self‐monitoring skills, an essential component of independent listening or reading. Students then generate a summary identifying and describing the main ideas of the

268 Rost text. Finally, they predict what is likely to occur next, providing evidence from the text for support. The process continues until students have read and discussed all of the assigned text. A fourth model, QAR (Question‐Answer‐Relationship) also placed the reader/listener as the central agent in the learning process, asking the students to consciously consider “sources of information”: What information is explicitly provided and what information the listener needs to construct. Listeners assess whether the speaker provides specific information explicitly or whether they will have to go “beyond the text” (Raphael & Pearson, 1985). When compared with control groups who did not receive comprehension instruction, nearly all such instructional techniques aid in building comprehension (Baker, DeWyngaert, & Zeliger‐ Kandasamy 2015). Today, comprehension building focuses on “quality questioning” – ways of guiding students toward cognitively deeper understanding. A concurrent goal of this approach is metacognitive: To lead students into a greater awareness of how they actively “process” texts as they listen or read. In this way, comprehension building instruction encourages independent learning (Kaur, 2014; Vandergrift & Goh, 2012) (see Table 16.1). Indeed, most students n ­ either enter school with nor automatically develop these skills as part of passive participation in classes. Instead, comprehension building skills, which are shown to help improve achievement, require direct instruction to develop (Abrami et al., 2015).

Academic Conversation The second approach to teaching listening is scaffolding the ways students approach understanding, exploration, and application of what they hear in real time. Listeners actively construct meaning through conversational practices of examining their own development of understanding and through querying their peers’ understanding of the same input or experience. These “academic conversations” involve affective, cognitive, and social elements (Zwiers & Soto, 2016). An academic conversation is a learned structure in which students practice discussing complex issues and defending their thinking. Through the use of academic conversations students learn to articulate their thinking, investigate their own thinking processes and the thinking of others, and actively listen to each other. A shift from “normal conversation” to “academic Table 16.1  Summary: comprehension building. Teaching approach Comprehension building texts

Learner mindset shift

Form of practice (interventions)

Monitoring/ evidence of uptake

Short lectures (e.g., lecture segments) Live/video informational presentations (e.g., TED Talks; online classes/ tutorials; audio books)

• Developing curiosity • Seeking deeper levels of comprehension • Making personal connections with text

• Advance organizers • “Quality questioning” by the teacher (with reflection time) • Peer questioning tasks • Multiple listenings with remedial questions

• Students show willingness to probe more deeply • Students reflect before answering • Greater interaction in peer/group tasks • Recognition/use of precise/advanced vocabulary • Students self‐report greater understanding/ satisfaction with listening work



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conversation” is achieved gradually through the use of conversation starters, such as “My experience with this is…” and “What do you mean by that reference?” Teachers have long encouraged their students to discuss what they have read or watched or heard as a way of deepening their comprehension skills. Unfortunately, without guidance or modeling, a typical classroom “discussion” may go something like this: student a:

What was the main idea of the story? Courage. student a: Yeah, the guy was brave. student b: OK. What do we do now? student b:

Left to their own devices, many classroom activities, such as think‐pair‐share or vocabulary games, often devolve in this way: They elicit short bursts of student output and interaction, but do not lead to extended discussions, personal engagement, or co‐construction of new ideas (Hall, 2016). This “opting out” behavior may be due to social awkwardness, habitual interaction patterns, or lack of guidance and support for having more meaningful c­ onversations. Teachers who allow this weakened discourse to occur repeatedly are likely to need additional training in how to intervene and support better conversations (Singer, 2018). What has proven to be helpful to students of all ages, but particularly school age students, is to demonstrate the idea of “conversation strategy” explicitly in a framework and present specific language frames for the students to use when they enact the strategy. For example, when working toward describing main ideas, teachers may ask “what is the central idea in this story” and provide students with the frame “the speaker is basically saying…” Drawing on studies of productive academic discussions, Table 16.2 presents six discourse exchange types that can be modeled for students (Beglar & Murray, 2017; Rost, 2016; Staarman Krol, & van der Meijden, 2005). Table 16.2  Summary: academic conversations. Focal strategies

Prompts for initiating

Prompts for responding

Frame and reframe topics and sub‐topics

Why do you think that (the speaker said…)?

I think (the speaker said…) to (teach us about…).

Elaborate and clarify points

Can you elaborate? What do you mean by…? What makes you think that? I’m not entirely clear about your point.

Let me tell you more about what I think. I think it means… In other words, … I think that’s true because…

Support ideas with evidence

Can you give me an example? Can you show me (remember) where they say that? Can you be more specific? Are there any cases of that that you know of?

For example… In the lecture, they said that… One case that showed this was…

Paraphrase and summarize

Let’s take a step back. What have we discussed so far? How can we summarize what we’ve talked out?

We can say that… So far, the main themes/points we’ve discussed are… This is a bit complex, but I think we can summarize by saying…

Build on or challenge another’s idea

What do you think? Can you add to this idea? Do you agree? What might be some other points of view?

I would add that… Then again, I think that… I want to expand on your point about…

Apply and connect

So what? How can we apply this idea to our lives? What can we learn from this (character/story/part of the lecture)?

I can offer something here. In my life… I think it can teach us… If I were…I would have…

270 Rost Once introduced and with training, student conversations will develop into more elaborate and satisfying exchanges: student a:

What do you think is the main theme of the story? I think the story teaches us about courage. student a: What makes you think that? student b: Well, Marco’s decision to go back and confront his father took a lot of courage. student a:  Yeah, going back took courage. I see what you mean. But what do you mean by “­confront his father”? student b:

Shifting to this type of academic discourse is not simply a behavioral adjustment. Teacher and students need a shared understanding of the underlying psychology in order to implement this approach. Most students, irrespective of cultural background, tend to be reticent and ­deferential in conversations, particularly younger learners. In developing academic listening skills of probing for common ground and defining points of view, however, it is essential that students push beyond their natural tendencies for agreeing or reaching a quick consensus and actively look for points of “respectful disagreement” with their classmates. Included in this shared understanding is an essential affective element in successful academic conversations – “positive regard” – a term grounded in the work of Carl Rogers on therapeutic listening. Positive regard means acknowledging and accepting each speaker’s contribution (Rogers, 1965). It is a foundation of both speaking and listening “authenticity,” a sense that all participants are communicating on a deep, personal level. This mindset can be encouraged through listening without judgment to each other’s ideas, supporting each other’s efforts to learn, and actively seeking out alternate points of view. Teachers assist through modeling and monitoring of positive conversational interaction in order to promote not only “higher level” academic conversations, but also improved well‐being among learners (Singer, 2018). Table 16.3 summarizes key elements of this approach.

Table 16.3  Summary: academic conversations. Teaching structures

Learner mindset shift

Form of practice

Monitoring/evidence of uptake

Text types: Imaginary scenarios (e.g., two patients need a kidney transplant, only one can receive it; how to decide)

• Developing curiosity about others’ points of view • Satisfaction with explaining one’s viewpoint/ expressing personal experience • Search for common ground, search for points of “reasonable disagreement”

• Direct instruction of interaction gambits • Video models of interaction gambits • Specific peer/small group interaction worksheets (e.g. grid with specific information/ opinions called for) • Teacher hand signals (or other non‐verbal codes) to indicate what features student should try

• Students using the target gambits • Students have more empathic and respectful interactions • Students have more explicit, extended conversations • Students make applications to their lives, rather than simply repeating information • Students self‐report greater engagement in discussions and more satisfaction with group work

Fictionalized news stories (e.g., a student is expelled from school for plagiarizing) Task types: Question–answer Group discussion



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Integration of Listening with Other Learning Modalities A third approach to teaching listening involves fashioning ways for listening to complement other language modalities, in service of larger learning goals. Many teachers find it beneficial to treat listening in the context of general educational objectives, rather than focusing exclusively on listening skill (Thompson & McKinley, 2018). Indeed, in most contexts of listening use – socially, educationally, or professionally – listening occurs concurrently with other ­modalities of language processing – speaking, reading, viewing, and writing. As seen in Table 16.4, activities involving listening are primarily “meaning‐focused” whereby the learner is asked to understand some content as central to an activity. Activities involving listening will be oriented toward ­learners analyzing input and using their understanding of the input in some form of output.

Listening and Reading

Meaning‐focused “input‐oriented” lessons involve learning through listening and reading, and possibly also through viewing media. Learners use language as a resource – initially in a receptive way, but with the intent of listening actively, focusing selectively, interpreting, ­integrating ideas, and constructing meaning. The main focus of this type of lesson is on understanding, then on gaining knowledge or enjoyment (or both) from what they listen to and read. Typical activities include shared reading, listening to stories, listening while reading (e.g. audio books), watching films, and conversational listening.

Listening, Speaking, and Writing

Meaning‐focused “output‐oriented” learning activities involve learning through listening, speaking and writing, ending with using language productively. Typical activities include shadowing, dyadic or small group conversations, giving a speech or presentation, writing a letter, keeping a diary, telling a story, and explaining how to do something.

Listening, Note‐taking, and Speaking

One prototypical meaning‐focused activity that is both “input-oriented” and “output‐­oriented” is note‐taking during a presentation or lecture (live/recorded, audio/video). Learners take notes, then highlight what they wish to discuss, clarify, or expand upon. Note‐taking is a ­prototypical “active listening” practice that forces students to make decisions about what is Table 16.4  Summary: integrating listening. Teaching approach

Learner mindset shift

Form of practice

Monitoring/ evidence of uptake

Text‐task combination types: • Listening + reading • Listening + writing • Listening + note‐taking • Listening + speaking/ discussion

• Listening is typically part of every learning activity; I need to engage as a listener in order to learn • Skills learned in listening will help me with content learning and interaction

• Online video viewing + writing • Read alouds/audio books + speaking (response to questions) • Listening + note‐taking • Listening to presentations + speaking • Listening + speaking: pair information/ opinion gap tasks

• Students smoothly transition from listening activity to other skill activity • Students see value in taking away specific information and insights from listening experiences • Students become engaged, “active listeners”

272 Rost “worth noting.” To maximize the active listening potential of note‐taking, it is helpful to ­introduce note‐taking methods and tasks (e.g., the outline method, the Cornell method; for explanations and examples, see https://lingual.net/blog/ and https://medium. goodnotes.com).

Listening and Writing

Another prototypical listening–writing activity is dictation, the intensive listening practice of writing down exactly what was said. There are a number of creative variations that promote close listening and provide useful practice in attending closely to the spoken input, including “dictogloss” (Swain, 2000), “cloze” dictation (Brown, 2013), and filtered‐speech dictation (Rost & Wilson, 2013) (see https://lingual.net/blog for explanations and examples).

Online Listening, Reading, and Writing

Teachers are increasingly drawing on public domain online listening resources (e.g., YouTube videos, TED Talks) to supplement classroom learning. Instructors can provide a list of topic‐ specific, appropriate videos for student use: Freedom of choice increases learner motivation. Importantly, teachers should provide guidance on how and what to listen for, as well as providing a specific task to complete while watching the video (see Day, Shaules, & Yamanaka, 2019, for activity examples).

Deliberate Practice Deliberate practice refers to a learning approach of analyzing component skills in an overall performance and practicing those sub‐skills that need most improvement (Ericsson, 2016). However, there is not necessarily a relationship between how often you practice, how “easy” the skill feels for you, and how well you execute that given skill. As many teachers can attest, it is entirely possible for a student to learn a skill incorrectly, or to introduce bad habits, or to use a practicing style with a faulty mindset. In effect, bad habits, or a problematic mindset, or poor form may actually prevent learners from ever mastering the target skill. For this reason, it is essential to have an experienced guide who has mastered the skills the student is pursuing, and to set up a practice that correctly models the target skills. The guide must also systematically observe the student while practicing in order to give corrective feedback. Deliberate practice is a form of instruction designed to help learners work on specific skills – with “deliberate” awareness that they are willingly practicing a component sub‐skill in order to improve their overall proficiency in a learning domain. To be effective, deliberate practice should be focused on a single learning objective, provide multiple opportunities (5–10 typically) for repetition and feedback, and offer ample time for reflection and de‐briefing of what has been practiced and learned. Table 16.5 summarizes several types of deliberate practice. Teachers who work with second language learners are aware that L2 learners require intensive work in bottom‐up listening skills (i.e., learning to perceive incoming speech accurately). Both “lower order” processing skills (phonological processing, word recognition, and grammatical parsing) and “higher order” thinking skills (inference, integration, application) can be the focus of deliberate practice, though native speakers of the target language will typically require less bottom‐up listening work. L1 listeners will need less focus on lower order skills, which have become largely automated, while L2 listeners (e.g. English Language Learners (ELLs)) will need supplemental deliberate practice with the lower order skills. Both groups require a focus on the higher order listening skills.



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Table 16.5  Summary: deliberate practice. Area of practice

Form of practice/repetition

Learner shift during practice

Lower level skills (perception, vocabulary recognition, parsing, short term memory) Speech processing: Minimal pairs

Series of pairs of phonological phrases that are identical or “minimally different” (e.g. Do you repair clocks? Do you repair clogs?); students listen and say “same” or “different”.

Improved ability to detect minimally different words

Speech processing: Noticing assimilations

Series of very short (5–7 seconds) bursts of speech, with recognition practice (such as T/F questions or fill in blanks) for problematic sequences (such as phrases with assimilated sounds); shadowing

Improved ability to listen to fast speech Improved ability to decode assimilated phrases Improved interest in hearing spoken language variations

Speech processing: Word stress

Series of phrases, delivered orally; students repeat or indicate the stressed syllables; or students do “word spotting”, writing down any words they have heard

Improved ability to attend to stress, pick out target words Improved ability to distinguish word boundaries

Speech processing: Detecting sentence stress

Series of sentences (or “idea units”); students indicate the most stressed word in each

Improved ability to identify words in the stream of speech

Speech processing: Parsing grammatical structures

Series of short comprehensible sentences (or “idea units”) with complex grammar, slightly above students’ productive ability; students choose correct written form of utterance, or write/fill in blanks

Improved ability to segment speech into component words Improved ability to make grammatical sentences from words recognized in speech

Vocabulary recognition: Picking out words in a stream of speech

Series of short extracts (25 words) with m/c or blank fills in for identifying which target words were uttered

Improved ability to recognize words Improved ability to identify boundaries of “unknown words”

Grammatical parsing: Making sense of phonological strings

Series of short extracts (25 words) with target grammatical structures blanked out; listeners attempt to fill in missing parts; followed by shadowing/ repetition

Improved ability to understand speech at natural speed Improved ability to construct grammatical sentences in speech and writing

Higher level skills (inferring, analyzing, synthesizing, summarizing) Memory building: Questions about reconstructing a story

Series of short stories, involving multiple actions and sequences

Improved attention span, improved recall (Continued)

274 Rost Table 16.5  (Continued) Area of practice

Form of practice/repetition

Learner shift during practice

Recognizing literal meaning: Questions about facts, details, or information explicitly stated in the audio story

Series of short extracts (25–50 words) with questions or T/F paraphrases about literal meaning (what was explicitly stated vs. inferable)

Increased awareness of literal vs. implied meaning

Understanding vocabulary: Questions about the meanings of words as they are used in the context of the extract

Series of short extracts (10–25 words) with questions (synonyms, rephrasings) about specific vocabulary items

Increase in receptive vocabulary

Making inferences: Questions asking students to make inferences as they listen to audio stories, interpreting what is said by going beyond the literal meaning

Series of short statements (10–25 words) with questions about what can be inferred from what was spoken

Improved ability to listen “actively” Making inferences while listening

Identifying main idea: Questions asking students to identify the main idea or gist of an audio story

Series of short extracts (30–60 seconds) with questions (T/F) or m/c or open‐ended about the main idea

Improved ability to listen selectively for most important information

Summarizing content: Questions asking students to summarize the content of an audio story

Series of short extracts (20 seconds, 100 words); students work alone or in pairs to create short (10–20 word) summaries

Improved ability to focus on main ideas Ability to formulate coherent short summaries

Determining point of view: Questions asking students to determine a speaker’s point of view or perspective in an audio story

Series of short extracts (30–60 seconds), such as movie scenes (in audio only or video formats), in which the characters have identifiable perspectives or emotional states

Improved ability to discern differences of emotional states in characters

Analyzing reasoning: Questions asking students to analyze a speaker’s reasoning or draw conclusions based on an audio extract

Series of short extracts, personal opinions about a topic or issue

Improved reasoning ability Tolerance for differing viewpoints

Finding evidence: Questions asking students to identify statements or details in an audio story that provide evidence to support inferences, interpretations, or conclusions

Series of short stories (2–3 minutes), involving problem‐solution structure

Improved critical thinking while listening

This differential treatment results from developmental sequences. In first language learning, listening is typically the primary language skill that children develop, and on the basis of their oral processing skill (which includes sensitivity to their L1 rhythm and intonation structure, intuitive knowledge of sound co‐occurrences and constraints), children subsequently add extended listening (such as story listening), speaking, reading, and eventually writing. By the time that the monolingual child is learning to read and write, listening will have been strongly



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established as a reliable means of comprehension and further learning and listening processes are largely automatic, requiring little attention (Cutler & Farrell, 2018).

Assessment Ideally, assessment and instruction are “symmetrical”: What is taught as important in class is what is assessed during tests. Moreover, the form of instruction and assessment should resemble each other such that tests provide feedback that readily helps students improve their abilities (Malone, 2017). In this vein, the instructional approaches outlined above, to the extent they are valid instructional practices that aid students in developing critical listening abilities (the “listening constructs”), can also be used for assessment: Teachers observe students during the activities, using their observations as a form of assessment (i.e., evidence that the student is engaged in learning the target skills). Using classroom instructional practices as a form of assessment improves the “face” or “subjective” validity – the degree to which the test taker considers the test a valid measure of what is being taught. Content validity, the degree to which test items adequately reflect the target behavior being assessed, is equally important. Assessment measures also need to have “empirical validity”  –  the results should correlate strongly with other measures of the same ability. Content validity and empirical validity refer to established “community standards” that teachers and students are accountable for attaining (Phillips, 2015; Harding, Alderson, & Brunfaut, 2015). Testing listening as an isolated construct is challenging – proficiency tests of any modality (listening, reading, speaking, writing) always assess multiple traits, not only traits related to the targeted modality (Sawaki, Kim, & Gentile, 2009). Most significantly, any test of listening will also provide information about “general language ability;” most also will provide information about “general world knowledge,” “reasoning ability,” and “test wiseness” (the acquired ability to understand what performance the test maker is seeking from the test taker). Because of the challenges of testing listening, educators must use caution in reporting assessment measures, and supplement formal test measures with classroom observation, and student self‐assessments (Bloomfield et al., 2010).

Summary Direct instruction in listening is necessary, for both first and second language students, in order to maximize the effect of instruction in content areas, as well as for strengthening overall language competence, critical thinking, and interpersonal communication. The chapter has offered principles for the direct teaching of listening skills in the classroom, along with guidelines for planning activities and assessments. ●●

●●

The chapter has attempted to address two significant questions of pedagogy: Why should listening be taught explicitly? How should we go about incorporating listening instruction into the classroom? The larger framework for these questions is: What is the relationship between my teaching practice and the development of my students’ listening skills?

It is hoped that the ideas in this chapter contribute toward improving listening pedagogy, and stimulate teachers to explore these important educational issues, both individually and collaboratively with colleagues.

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References Abrami, P., Bernard, R., Brokohovski, E., Waddington, D., Wade, C., & Persson, T. (2015). Strategies for teaching students to think critically: A meta‐analysis. Review of Educational Research, 85, 275–314. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654314551063 Alonso, L. (1996). Improving deficient listening skills in the language arts program at the middle grades. (Unpublished master’s thesis). St. Xavier University: Chicago, IL. ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 398611. Au, K. H. (1979). Using the Experience‐Text‐Relationship method with minority children. The Reading Teacher, 32, 677–679. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20194851 Baggio, G. (2018). Meaning and the brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Baker, L., DeWyngaert, L., & Zeliger‐Kandasamy, A. (2015). Metacognition in comprehension instruction: New directions. In S. Paris & K. Headley (Eds.), Comprehension instruction: Research‐ based best practices (3rd ed., pp. 72–87). New York: Guilford Press. Beglar, D., & Murray, N. (2017). Contemporary topics: 21st century skills for academic success (3rd ed.). New York: Pearson. Bergen, B. K. (2012). Louder than words: The new science of how the mind makes meaning. New York: Basic Books. Bloomfield, A., Wayland, S., Rhoades, E. Blodgett, A., Linck, J., & Ross, S. (2010). What makes listening difficult? Factors affecting second language listening comprehension. [Technical report TTO 81434 E 3.1] College Park: MD, University of Maryland Center for Advanced Study of Language. Retrieved from https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a550176.pdf Bond, C. (2012). An overview of best practices to teach listening skills. International Journal of Listening, 26, 61–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/10904018.2012.677660 Bostrom, R. (2011). Rethinking conceptual approaches to the study of “listening.” International Journal of Listening, 25, 10–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/10904018.2011.536467 Brown, J. D. (2013). My twenty‐five years of cloze testing research: So what? International Journal of Language Studies, 7, 1–32. Retrieved from: http://www.ijls.net/sample/71‐1.pdf Carr, E., & Ogle, D. (1987). K‐W‐L Plus: A strategy for comprehension and summarization. Journal of Reading, 30, 626–631. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40031872 Carreker, S. (2016). How listening comprehension informs instruction. Perspectives on Language and Literacy, 42, 17–22. Retrieved from https://app.box.com/s/7otr0zpyd0ypkchltpu0r4anzzbd4qjh Caspersz, D., & Stasinska, A. (2015). Can we teach effective listening? An exploratory study. Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice, 12(4), Art. 2. Retrieved from https://ro.uow.edu.au/ jutlp/vol12/iss4/2 Concannon‐Gibney, T. (2018). Teaching essential literacy skills in the early years classroom: A guide for students and teachers. London: Routledge. Cutler, A., & Farrell, J. (2018). Listening in first and second language. In J. I. Liontas (Ed.), The TESOL encyclopedia of language teaching. Advance online publication. New York: Wiley. https://doi. org/10.1002/9781118784235.eelt0583 Day, R., Shaules, J., & Yamanaka, J. (2019). Impact issues: Presenting your ideas in English. Singapore: Pearson. Donoghue, M. (2009). Language arts: Integrating skills for classroom teaching. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Ericsson, K. A. (2016). Summing up hours of any type of practice versus identifying optimal practice activities: Comments on Macnamara, Moreau, and Hambrick (2016). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11, 351–354. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1745691616635600 Evans, V. (2015). The crucible of language: How language and mind create meaning. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Flavell, J. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive‐ developmental inquiry. American Psychologist, 34, 906–911. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0003‐066X.34.10.906 Gilbert, M. B. (1988) Listening in school: I know you can hear – me But are you listening? International Journal of Listening, 2, 121–132. https://doi.org/10.1080/10904018.1988.10499102 Goh, C., & Burns, A. (2012). Teaching speaking: A holistic approach. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.



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Hall, L. (2016). “I don’t really have anything good to say”: Examining how one teacher worked to shape middle school students’ talk about texts. Research in the Teaching of English, 51, 60–83. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/24889934 Harding, L., Alderson, J. C., & Brunfaut, T. (2015). Diagnostic assessment of reading and listening in a second or foreign language: Elaborating on diagnostic principles. Language Testing, 32, 317–336. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265532214564505 Heritage, J., & Clayman, S. (2010). Talk in action: Interactions, identities, and institutions. New York: Wiley. Kaur, K. (2014). Young learners’ metacognitive knowledge of listening comprehension and pedagogical recommendations for the teaching of listening. International Journal of Innovation in English Language Teaching, 3, 231–244. Kim, Y.‐S., & Phillips, B. (2014). Cognitive correlates of listening comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly, 49, 269–281. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.74 Kirova A. (2015) Critical and emerging discourses in multicultural education literature. In Guo S., & Wong L. (Eds.), Revisiting multiculturalism in Canada. Transnational migration and education (pp. 239–254). Rotterdam: SensePublishers. Malone, M. (2017). Training in language assessment. In E. Shohamy, I. G. Or, & S. May (Eds.), Language testing and assessment (3rd ed, pp. 225–239). New York: Springer. Marzano, R. (1991). Tactics for thinking: A program for initiating the teaching of thinking. In A. Costa (Ed.), Developing minds (pp. 65–68). Alexandria, VA; Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development. Ovando, C., & Combs, M. (2018). Bilingual and ESL classrooms: Teaching in multicultural contexts. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Palinscar, A., & Brown, A. (1984). Reciprocal teaching of comprehension‐fostering and comprehension‐monitoring activities. Cognition and Instruction, 1, 117–175. https://doi.org/10.1207/ s1532690xci0102_1 Phillips, C. (2015). Common Core state standards: Challenge and collaboration. The Educational Forum, 79, 200–205. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131725.2015.1004209 Ramirez, P. C., & Jimenez‐Silva, M. (2014). Secondary English learners: Strengthening their literacy skills through culturally responsive teaching. Kappa Delta Pi Record, 50, 65–69. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/00228958.2014.900846 Raphael, T., & and Pearson, P.D. (1985). Increasing students’ awareness of sources of information for answering questions. American Educational Research Journal, 22, 217–235. https://doi. org/10.3102/00028312022002217 Rogers, C. (1965). The therapeutic relationship: Recent theory and research. Australian Journal of Psychology, 17, 95–108. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00049536508255531 Rost, M. (2016). Teaching and researching listening (3rd ed.). New York: Routledge. Rost, M., & Wilson, J. (2013). Active listening: Research and resources in language teaching. New York: Routledge. Rymes, B. (2015). Classroom discourse analysis: A tool for critical reflection (3rd edition). New York, NY: Routledge. Sawaki, Y., Kim, H‐J, & Gentile, C. (2009). Q‐matrix construction: Defining the link between constructs and test items in large‐scale reading and listening comprehension assessments. Language Assessment Quarterly, 6, 190–209. https://doi.org/10.1080/15434300902801917 Singer, T. (2018). EL excellence every day: The flip‐to guide for differentiating academic literacy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Staarman, J., Krol, K., & van der Meijden, H. (2005). Peer interaction in three collaborative learning environments. Journal of Classroom Interaction, 40, 29–39. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/43997883 Swain, M. (2000). The output hypothesis and beyond: mediating acquisition through collaborative ­dialogue. In J. Lantolf (Ed.), Sociocultural theory and second language learning (pp. 97–114). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thompson, G., & Mckinley, J. (2018). Integration of content and language learning. In J. I. Liontas, M. DelliCarpini, & S. Abrar‐ul‐Hassan (Eds.), TESOL encyclopedia of English language teaching (1st ed.). New York: Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118784235

278 Rost Vandergrift, L., & and Goh, C. C‐M. (2012). Teaching and Learning Second Language Listening: Metacognition in Action. New York: Routledge. Walsh, J. A., & Sattes, B.D. (2017). Quality questioning: Research‐based practice to engage every learner. London: Sage. Wilson, D., & Sperber, D. (2012). Meaning and relevance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zwiers, J., & Soto, I. (2016). Academic language mastery: Conversational discourse in context. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

17

Teaching Listening in Classroom Settings Mary Lahman

Students listen to learn and to connect with teachers and their peers. Understanding the links between reading, listening, and learning can help teachers and students foreground learning behaviors needed to link prior knowledge with new information. This chapter explores the connections between listening and reading comprehension, as well as the effect of instructor behaviors and practices on student learning in the classroom. Beginning with the conceptualization of listening and reading comprehension and ending with the impact of these constructs on learning, the reader will find pedagogical insight and instructional strategies for optimal learning across grade levels.

Conceptualizing Listening and Reading Comprehension Ralph Nichols was one of the first researchers to explore the impact of listening on learning in the college classroom. Known as the “Father of Listening” (Wolvin, 2006), Nichols’s (1948) early research found a moderate to strong association between his measure of listening comprehension (72 multiple choice items administered after one of several lectures) and a measure of reading comprehension (the Iowa Silent Reading Examination). Moreover, Nichols’s study was among several others around this same time (e.g., Bird, 1953; Goldstein, 1941) that ­distinguished between listening and reading comprehension. He argued that they were distinct, even if both are “closely related skills” that are “of approximately equal efficiency in learning” (p. 155). Even so, Nichols (1948) expressed concern about the lack of listening research, finding only 14 studies that explored listening comprehension compared to 1,951 studies addressing reading comprehension (p. 154). In many ways, this trend continues. For instance, although Bourdeaud’hui, Aesaert, Van Keer, and van Braak (2018) ­identified 3553 listening-related articles, only 126 were empirically-based investigations about first-language (L1) listening. Bourdeaud’hui et  al. then explored whether any of these 126 articles investigated “operationally defined listening skills based on one or more components of the HURIER model” (p. 90; see Brownell, 2012; and this volume).

The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

280 Lahman This final exclusion criterion resulted in only 27 articles. Most of these studies (n = 18, 67%) assessed understanding, defined as comprehending the literal content of a message, and just under half (n = 12, 44%) assessed interpreting, or the ability to fully grasp the meaning of an utterance based on the context; few of the 27 studies provided data on student hearing (n = 5, 19%), remembering (n = 8, 30%), evaluating (n = 4, 15%), or responding (n = 2, 7%). Thus, according to this review, the main focus of first-language acquisition (L1) research seems to be on whether students can immediately recall and construct meaning from aural messages. Bourdeaud’hui et al. (2018) also organized the studies according to an educational effectiveness model that included training inputs and outputs at the “school,” “classroom,” and “student” levels (p. 89). None of the studies addressed school‐level characteristics, while 15 focused on class‐level and 12 focused on student‐level variables. Indeed, the focus of most listening‐ related scholarship within L1 settings is on characteristics of the classroom (or  teacher) and characteristics of students that impact abilities to comprehend spoken language (and perhaps understand that speech). Given the focus of past research, this chapter focuses on the influence of teaching on student learning and skill building.

Listening and Reading Comprehension at the Classroom Level Listening and reading comprehension are intimately related (Solari, Grimm, McIntyre & Denton, 2018). Not only do reading and listening comprehension activate the same regions in the brain for both word and passage processing, and for speech and print modalities (Ryherd et al., 2018), but each seems contingent on a set of key skills like word recognition that lead to more comprehensive language processing skills. We will explore this connection first in the K‐12 then in the higher education context then turn to strategies found to best teach reading and listening in the classroom.

Listening in K‐12 Education Kim (2017) proposed the Direct and Indirect Effect Model of Reading (DIER) to provide a hierarchical framework of cognitive skills needed for students to listen and ­recognize words in order to read (see Figure 17.1). First, word recognition is predicted by vocabulary, grammar, and working memory. Second, each of these foundational skills contribute to higher‐level thinking skills, such as inference‐making, perspective taking, and comprehension. Ultimately, listening comprehension and word recognition rely on foundational cognitive components, which lead to higher‐order thinking skills. Teachers who know about both foundational and higher level cognitive and language skills have more opportunities to help students with reading comprehension. These findings address the “student‐ level” training that Bourdeaud’hui et al. (2018) recommended: Teachers should develop both vocabulary and grammar knowledge, in addition to helping children make inferences and take different perspectives. Gray, Catts, Logan, and Pentimonti (2017) also advocated for teaching various combinations of oral language behaviors: inference making, vocabulary, syntax, letter knowledge, phonological awareness, narrative comprehension, and production measures. Exploring the dimensionality of an “oral language” construct, scholars in the consortium found that listening comprehension was part of the broader oral language construct, not distinguishable from vocabulary and grammar. Consequently, they advocated for measuring vocabulary instead of employing lengthier listening measures. This emphasis on vocabulary would be part of the foundational skills that lead to a child’s inference making, perspective taking, and comprehension monitoring, which Kim (2017) determined builds listening comprehension.



281

Teaching Listening in Classroom Settings TNL

OWLS

.80

.60

EXP .72

.45

.12

.87

.62

.13

.23

.39

WIAT

Reading Comprehension

Listening Comprehension .12 .26

WJ-III

.39 .33

Inference

.30

Theory of Mind

.46

.43

.30

Vocabulary

.16

.22

.43

.39

Word Reading

Grammar .41

.52

.74

Comp Monitor

.31

.91 .83 .80

WJ-III SWE A .76 SWE B

Working Memory .35 .24

Figure 17.1  Kim (2017) Direct and Indirect Effect Model of Reading (DIER) with standardized structural regression weights. Note. Two‐sided arrows represent covariances. TNL = Test of Narrative Language; OWLS = Listening Comprehension scale of Oral and Written Language Scales‐II; EXP = Experimental expository task; WJ‐III = Woodcock Johnson‐III; WIAT = Wechsler Individual Achievement Test‐3; SWE A = Sight Word Efficiency of TOWRE form A; SWE B = Sight Word Efficiency of TOWRE form B; Comp Monitor = comprehension m ­ onitoring (Kim, 2017, p. 325).

To help school‐aged children build their vocabulary, Valentini, Ricketts, Pye, and Houston‐ Price (2018) proposed that students hear stories while they are reading along. Noting many studies that advocate using stories for optimal learning, they argued for a combination of reading and listening to reduce cognitive load, thereby making space in working memory (p. 12). They also argued that students who learn with both aural and written information might readily retrieve this learning in the future, regardless of reading ability. They cautioned, ­however, that modality (i.e., reading, listening, or combined reading and listening) does affect learning (for 8 and 9‐year‐olds) as student ability to recognize vocabulary is correlated with seeing new words in writing. Clarifying the effects of training modality on working memory and metacognitive knowledge (awareness of one’s own thinking and meaning making), Carretti, Caldarola, Tencati, and Cornoldi (2014) explored the impact of training programs for improving comprehension in reading and listening settings. Carretti et al. (2014) found that teacher use of metacognitive and working memory activities, included as part of regular 4th and 5th grade classroom exercises, correlated with gains in reading and listening comprehension. While they found more gains in reading modality than in the listening modality, they proposed that the reading gains could stem from teacher comfort with reading exercises, in addition to reading exercises that impact decoding as well as comprehension skills.

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Listening in Higher Education Whereas K‐12 research tends to focus on listening and reading comprehension, L1 research in higher education explores how listening is differentiated from memory, thinking, and other cognitive constructs. For example, Janusik (2005) explored working memory as a foundation for listening models that more accurately represent how the brain works. She raised awareness of the need to differentiate listening cognition and listening behavior when teaching and researching listening, bringing together the fields of psychology, neurology, and communication. One of the more popular areas of listening research in higher education, recognized by both L1 and second-language acquisition (L2) scholars, is the importance of metacognitive knowledge to build awareness for and self‐regulation of listening skills (Silver, 2013; Vandergrift & Goh, 2012). More recently, Janusik and Lahman (2018) introduced a metacognitive pedagogical sequence to inform listening and learning practice in the college classroom. They noted increased student predictions (planning) of main ideas covered in class, use of monitoring strategies to “focus harder on the lesson when having trouble understanding,” and use of problem‐solving strategies to retain and recall more of the lesson. However, they cautioned that students did not like the pedagogical sequence and instructors needed more training on the differences between cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies. Imhof and Janusik (2017) raised awareness of listening as concept‐driven behavior with four dimensions. They found that how one defines listening influences one’s ability to listen to others. Bodie (2010) confirmed these four dimensions – information acquisition, relationship building, learning, evaluative listening – as a way to conceptualize listening across cultures. Even with the caution that there might be dimensions missing, Imhof and Janusik provide evidence for listening concepts as state variables that can inform our understanding of the listening across cultures (see also, Imhof, this volume). Imhof (1998) distinguished between “content‐related” (activating schemata and asking pre‐questions), “self‐related” (interest building and defining an intention), and “speaker‐ related” (clarifying and considering speaker’s point of view) strategies that influence students’ abilities to listen and learn (pp. 101–102). Reviewing listening‐related teaching publications from 1949 to 2001, Janusik (2002) concluded that students need to understand the contextual and processual (i.e., strategies are needed before, during, and after listening) nature of listening. Finally, Beall, Gill‐Rosier, Tate, and Matten (2008) noted that effective L1 listeners experienced more success in college than ineffective listeners, and L2 researchers found that college students who have metacognitive knowledge of listening show increases in motivation and listening proficiency (Vandergrift, 2005; Goh, 2008).

Listening and Reading Strategies for Optimal Learning It is clear that educators across the academic landscape and across the globe believe it possible to teach students how to read and how to listen. But how should teachers and students approach listening and reading strategies training? As noted above, Bourdeaud’hui et  al. (2018) suggested integrating listening skills training into the entire elementary curriculum (school, classroom, teacher), instead of teaching listening as a standalone skill. Others believe students should be exposed to explicit training in listening (ideally in a stand‐alone course or sequenced curriculum) in a manner at least equivalent to the focused attention given to training in reading. Lahman, Calka, Case, and McKenna‐Buchanan (2018) proposed that college students need metacognitive listening strategies to communicate across contexts, so students should be encouraged to ask, “Am I understanding what I’m listening to, and, if not, which skill or skills can I implement to get back on track” (p. 13). Similarly, metacognitive reading strategies include activating prior knowledge before reading and checking for



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­ nderstanding during reading (Iwai, 2016). Notably, metacognitive reading strategies are u associated with academic success (Chevalier, Parrila, Ritchie & Deacon, 2017), and work in the L2 domain provides evidence for the same with listening (Vandergrift & Goh, 2012). Ultimately, metacognitive interventions help students know what skills to use to get back on track across grade levels and disciplines. In higher education, instructors in STEM fields (Lemons, Reynolds, Curtin‐Sydan, & Bissell, 2013), social sciences (LaVaque‐Manty & Evans, 2013), and humanities (Hall, Danielewicz, & Ware, 2013) used metacognitive process ­ strategies  –  planning, monitoring, problem‐solving, and evaluating  –  to improve learning outcomes in the classroom. Cognitive skills help students to make meaning, but a metacognitive skill or strategy helps students monitor their ability to make meaning. Thus, students might use a cognitive listening or reading strategy to comprehend or “make progress,” but employ a metacognitive strategy to monitor the listening and reading processes (Flavell, 1985). Metacognition includes both self‐reflection and self‐direction (Vandergrift, Goh, Mareschal, & Tafaghodtari, 2006). L2 researchers have used this four‐step sequence to encourage student interaction when completing metacognitive listening tasks (Bozorgian & Alamdari, 2018; Cross, 2011). L1 researchers have followed suit. For instance, LaVaque‐Manty and Evans (2013) proposed that instructors embed metacognitive planning components, such as prediction, in assignments and activities already in place. So, instructors who already use reading questions and/or reading notes can make metacognition transparent by having students use their answers and notes to predict three main ideas discussed that day. Moreover, if students have the opportunity to discuss their predictions with others, they are discussing course content and sharing differences in concepts included in reading notes, thereby engaging in learning activity (see Rost, this volume). Students must then assess if they comprehend course content. In other words, they need opportunities to practice monitoring listening and reading comprehension and solving any comprehension problems. This may be difficult, especially if students overestimate their understanding of material (Silver, 2013). Lovett (2013) reminded instructors that students might not be able to transfer what they know about metacognitive processes, especially if it is outside the context in which they learned the strategy. For example, instructors may want to include time for students to talk with peers to discuss predictions. If they discover they do not understand the material, then students need to ask for clarification. Teaching students that sharing their understanding or lack of comprehension (i.e., responding) is part of the listening/ learning process may encourage them to ask questions to clarify expectations. Again, instructors may already have opportunities for students to summarize what they know about course material during and after the lesson, and write about the “muddiest point” of the day. These activities become metacognitive when students wrestle with misunderstanding and then adjust their approaches to learning. As students move to evaluating their planning and monitoring processes, LaVaque‐Manty and Evans (2013) warned that superficial reflections might signal thinking in terms of “right” or “wrong” answers. Instead, students need to collaborate to identify main ideas learned; discussing how their listening and reading processes did and did not help them comprehend the lesson. They should then agree on the key “take‐aways” – the main ideas gleaned from the lesson. When students have repeated opportunities to increase predictions (planning) of main ideas covered in class, in addition to using monitoring strategies to focus on the lesson, and problem‐solving strategies to retain the lesson, they can implement listening strategies for optimal learning (Birjandi & Rahimi, 2012; Janusik & Lahman, 2018; O’Bryan & Hegelheimer, 2009). In addition to understanding how metacognitive listening strategies influence learning, students need help to understand listening as a cognitive process. Because listening is more a function of habit than conscious choice, people listen for different things. Humans process

284 Lahman information in different ways (see Imhof, this volume). Recent work by Bodie, Winter, Dupuis, and Tompkin (2019) resulted in the ECHO Listening Profile, which extends the work on listening styles more broadly as follows. The first dimension captures variability in how closely listeners attend to content‐level details shared by speakers (Analytical Listening; AL) compared to ideations surrounding the possibilities implied in speech (Conceptual Listening; CL). The second dimension captures variability in how closely listeners filter information through what it means for others (Connective Listening; CV) compared to how it relates to one’s own perspective and past experience (Reflective Listening; RL) (Bodie, et al., 2019, p. 19). ECHO helps students identify and make shifts in their listening preferences. Along with Bodie and Winter, I am currently exploring how ECHO might help students enrolled in a first‐year experience course understand how habits that drive listening may impact individual ability to process information and work in teams in the college classroom.

Instructor Behaviors Impact Listening and Learning To this point, the focus of this chapter has largely been on general teaching strategies that impact student learning as well as specific student‐level factors that can be the focus of listening instruction (e.g., metacognition, listening habits). In this section, we transition to focus on teacher‐specific behaviors and their impact on student learning. In other words, regardless of the general type of instruction being provided, there are characteristics of teachers, the ones who administer this instruction, that can influence how and whether students learn. Although it might seem trite, the evidence points toward the power of active‐empathic listening (AEL) as a general trait of effective teachers (Weger, 2018). AEL includes being sensitive to emotions, activating appropriate cognitive schemas to best understand student comments, and engaging in a range of verbal and nonverbal behaviors to clarifying questions to demonstrate understanding and build rapport (Bodie, 2011). The focus of the next few subsections is on these specific responding behaviors and their role in creating a learning environment.

Teacher Immediacy The role of teacher immediacy, those behaviors that create a sense of psychological closeness between teachers and students, has a long history. Research has found that teachers perceived as more immediate (based on student evaluations) are also perceived as more credible (e.g., Zhu & Anagondahalli, 2018) and generate a higher degree of student motivation and engagement in learning (Mazer & Stowe, 2016). Perhaps more importantly, students who report their teachers as more immediate also report greater gains in affective and cognitive learning (e.g., Frisby & Martin, 2010). When teachers use students’ names, encourage curiosity with questions, smile and nod to show enthusiasm, arrive early to class, and remain available for questions afterward, student are benefited (Gleason, 1986). These rapport‐building techniques are also good for creating an open and inclusive classroom environment (Frisby, Berger, Burchett, Herovic, & Strawser 2014). Indeed, Weger (2018) found that student perceptions of teacher immediacy are negatively related with perceptions of classroom incivility. When instructors listen to understand, students may be more likely to participate in class, learn more, and use fewer challenge behaviors. So what behaviors contribute to student perceptions of teacher immediacy? Keller, Hoy, Goetz, and Frenzel, (2016) projected that teacher enthusiasm, especially nonverbal cues such as energetic body movement and animated facial expressions help keep student attention.



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Enthusiastic teachers used vocal variety, head nodding, smiling, and broad gestures to bring energy into the classroom, many of the behaviors associated with teacher immediacy. Likewise, Myers and Knox (2001) found that instructors who demonstrate “verbal immediacy” including self‐disclosure help to clarify course content, to promote discussion, and to encourage more information‐seeking behaviors from students. And, instructors who are “verbally receptive” listen to and appreciate others’ ideas; they are paying attention and receptive to others (Goodboy & Myers, 2008). Frisby and her colleagues (2014) challenged college instructors to be more aware of students’ “affiliative, competence and autonomy face needs” (p. 118). Recommendations included giving students choices for how to earn participation points to promote autonomy and posing discussion questions to build student curiosity and concept connections, not merely assess accuracy of answers. Indeed, a core function of listening is to promote feelings of belonging and inclusion. Gilson & Little (2016) proposed a continuum of teacher listening behavior in the middle school classroom with listening behaviors ranging between evaluative listening (assessing accuracy of student responses, with less openness and expectation for student talking), and student‐oriented listening (less assessment of accuracy, with more openness and expectation for student talking). They observed that instructors need training on how to ask questions that encourage student‐oriented listening and provide specific examples of how to do so. For example, when instructors listen for correct answers they take away student autonomy by directing the discourse. Instead, instructors can remain open to students determining the direction of the discussion. Instructors listen to understand, not assess. Imhof (2008) challenged educators to create learning environments that provide a variety of listening opportunities. She was disappointed to find that student listening tasks narrowed while in secondary education, because the teachers lectured more. Picou, Charles and Rickets (2017) found that there is a “sweet spot” for listening effort: “engaging enough to require competition for cognitive resources, but not so engaging that performance on the primary task declines” (p. 151). In addition to teacher immediacy (and related behaviors) other teaching practices also encourage listening opportunities. A primary set of practices includes how teachers use technology.

Teacher Use of Technology Teachers can engage both reading and listening behaviors by using visuals to accompany listening tasks. Worthington and Levasseur (2015) explored the impact of PowerPoint slides to aid note‐taking, and Heflin, Shewmaker, and Nguyen (2017) investigated the use of mobile devices to promote learning in college classrooms. Unfortunately, PowerPoint slides used for note‐taking did not improve student exam scores. And, mobile devices may have contributed to perceptions of collaboration, but their use led to lower critical thinking scores. Virzi, Rouse, and Miller‐Perrin (2018), exploring the impact of introversion and extraversion on sensory awareness, warned readers to reduce distractions that target the auditory sense. Introverts have less “stringency of the ascending reticular activating systems” (p. 210), which means that they do not readily filter out distractions, increasing their cognitive loads. Boyle & Nicol (2003) credited “classroom communication technology” for helping ­students keep track of their learning and for helping teachers identify concepts needing clarification (p. 55). Different student response technologies, such as clickers in college classrooms (Trees & Jackson, 2007), encourage student listening and learning. However, researchers agree that students must understand the relevance of using feedback for learning. In other words, instructors must explicitly tie clicker questions and answers to course design. In addition, students must see how learning from clicker questions supersedes merely listening to the lecture. For example, Boyle & Nicol (2003) recommended including students in question formation in order to build student autonomy and to avoid teacher driven discussions.

286 Lahman Similarly, Gleason (1986) suggested that instructors could make “receivers become senders” (p. 22) by involving students in question creation (e.g., submit questions ahead of time, have students know which days they will be asking questions). Rothstein, Santana, and Minigan (2015) found that learners who were in charge of choosing the questions they most wanted to answer were more engaged in the learning process. They proposed having students follow the “Question Formulation Technique” for learning how to ask better questions: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Ask as many questions as you can. Do not stop to discuss, judge, or answer the questions. Write down every question exactly as it is stated. Change any statement into a question. (p.71)

When students generate questions, they are more curious about listening and learning because they are a part of the process that sets the learning agenda.

Helping Students Become More Curious: Appreciative Inquiry Appreciative inquiry is another classroom question practice that can build listening skills and encourage collaboration in college classrooms (Conklin, 2009; Lahman, 2011, 2012). Cooperrider, Whitney, & Stavros (2008, p. 5) noted that appreciative inquiry (AI) in the classroom involves each student in a 4D process: ●● ●● ●● ●●

Discover – appreciating “what gives life?” Dream – envisioning “what might be?” Design – constructing “how can it be?” Destiny – sustaining “what will be?”

Davies and Lewis (2013) credited AI for involving elementary children in research and building listening skills, highlighting how “AI meets a deep‐seated need in each one of us, to be respected, to be listened to and to have the opportunity to shape the future” (p. 61). Conklin (2009) and Lahman (2011) used AI to explore students’ peak learning experiences at the beginning of the semester. To maximize listening opportunities, Conklin and Lahman form student dyads and small groups which allow individuals to share their answers during the “discovery” and “design” phase, respectively. These interpersonal and small group discussions create communication climates that are noticeably more energetic (Lahman, 2012).

Student Note‐taking In addition to classroom technology and question generation practices, Al‐Musalli (2015) proposed note‐taking practices that make explicit the listening skills and subskills needed to take notes. Moreover, the author creates a taxonomy of the subskills that listening and note‐ taking have in common, so that students could develop these two integrated skills together. Instructors can use the taxonomy to help students understand how the ability to take notes comes from a series of decisions along the way (p. 144). For example, decisions at the literal level address meaning and grammar, inferential level decisions focus on attitudes and ­intentions, and critical level decisions speak to the purpose of the interaction. In tandem with note‐taking subskills of identifying main ideas and making connections between main ideas, listening shares other subskills with note‐taking, such as phonological, syntactic, lexical, logical, textual, judgment, and response skills (p. 143).



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Conclusion Understanding the connections between reading and listening comprehension, as well as the effect of instructor behaviors and practices on student listening and learning in the classroom, encourages teacher and student, alike, to foreground reading and listening behaviors for optimal learning across grade levels. Much has been discovered and much remains to be discovered about the impact of reading and listening comprehension on learning in the classroom. May teachers and researchers, alike, continue to raise awareness of the impact of listening and reading strategies on learning in academic contexts.

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Lahman, M. P. (2011). Appreciative inquiry + general semantics → IFD disease resistance. ETC: A Review of General Semantics, 68, 395–401. Retrived from www.jstor.org/stable/42579141 Lahman, M. P. (2012). Appreciative inquiry: Guided reflection to generate change in service‐learning courses. Communication Teacher, 26, 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1080/17404622.2011.625362 Lahman, M. P., Calka, M., Case, J A., & McKenna‐Buchanan, T. (2018). Communication across contexts: A listening‐centered approach (2nd ed.). Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt. LaVaque‐Manty, M., & Evans, E. M. (2013). Implementing metacognitive interventions in ­disciplinary writing classes. In M. Kaplan, N. Silver, D. LaVaque‐Manty, & D. Meizlish (Eds.), Using reflection and metacognition to improve students learning: Across the disciplines, across the academy (pp. 122–146). Sterling, VA: Stylus. Lemons, P. P., Reynolds, J. A., Curtin‐Sydan, A. J., & Bissell, A. N. (2013). Improving critical‐thinking skills in introductory biology through quality practice and metacognition. In M. Kaplan, N. Silver, D. LaVaque‐Manty, & D. Meizlish (Eds.), Using reflection and metacognition to improve students learning: Across the disciplines, across the academy (pp. 53–77). Sterling, VA: Stylus. Lovett, M. C. (2013). Make exams worth more than the grade. In M. Kaplan, N. Silver, D. LaVaque‐ Manty, & D. Meizlish (Eds.), Using reflection and metacognition to improve students learning: Across the disciplines, across the academy (pp. 18–52). Sterling, VA: Stylus. Mazer, J. P., & Stowe, S. A. (2016). Can teacher immediacy reduce the impact of verbal aggressiveness? Examining effects on student outcomes and perceptions of teacher credibility. Western Journal of Communication, 80, 21–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/10570314.2014.943421 Myers, S. A. & Knox, R. L. (2001). The relationship between college student information seeking behaviors and perceived instructor verbal behaviors. Communication Education, 50, 343–356. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634520109379260 Nichols, R. G. (1948). Factors in listening comprehension. Speech Monographs, 15, 154–163. https:// doi.org/10.1080/03637754809374953 O’Bryan, A., & Hegelheimer, V. (2009). Using a mixed methods approach to explore strategies, metacognitive awareness and the effects of task design on listening development. Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique appliquée, 12, 9–38. Retrieved from https:// journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/CJAL/article/download/19897/21734 Picou, E. M., Charles, L. M., & Ricketts, T. A. (2017). Child–adult differences in using dual‐task ­paradigms to measure listening effort. American Journal of Audiology, 26, 143–154. https://doi. org/10.1044/2016_AJA‐16‐0059 Rothstein, D., Santana, L., & Minigan, A. P. (2015). Making questions flow. Educational Leadership, 73, 70–75. Ryherd, K., Jasinska, K., Van Dyke, J. A., Hung, Y.‐H., Baron, E., Mencl, W. E., Landi, N. (2018). Cortical regions supporting reading comprehension skill for single words and discourse. Brain & Language, 186, 32–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2018.08.001 Silver, N. (2013). Reflective pedagogies and the metacognitive turn in college teaching. In Kaplan, M, Silver, N., Lavaque‐Manty, D, & Meizlish, D. (Eds.), Using reflection and metacognition to improve students learning: Across the disciplines, across the academy (pp. 1–17). Sterling, VA: Stylus. Solari, E. J., Grimm, R. P., McIntyre, N. S., & Denton, C. A. (2018). Reading comprehension development in at‐risk vs. not at‐risk first grade readers: The differential roles of listening comprehension, decoding, and fluency. Learning and Individual Differences, 65, 195–206. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.lindif.2018.06.005 Trees, A. R., & Jackson, M. H. (2007). The learning environment in clicker classrooms: Student processes of learning and involvement in large university‐level courses using student response systems. Learning, Media and Technology, 32, 21–40, https://doi.org/10.1080/17439880601141179 Valentini, A., Ricketts, J., Pye, R. E., & Houston‐Price, C. (2018). Listening while reading promotes word learning from stories. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 167, 10–31. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.jecp.2017.09.022 Vandergrift, L. (2005). Relationships among motivation orientations, metacognitive awareness and proficiency in L2 listening. Applied linguistics, 26, 70–89. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amh039 Vandergrift, L., & Goh, C. M. (2012). Teaching and learning second language listening: Metacognition in action. New York: Routledge.

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Music Education Daniel C. Johnson

Listening to music, a practice that many scholars believe pre‐dates human language (Mithen, 2006), is arguably the most primary and prevalent communication practice in society. People have an unprecedented access to music in twenty‐first‐century societies, and music listening is a powerful and omnipresent element of daily life across all human cultures (Wade, 2004). Consequently, in contemporary society, students are frequently overwhelmed with the sheer quantity of music and information available, which may lead them to become passive musical consumers instead of active, discriminating listeners. Students experience the effects of music cognitively, emotionally, and socially (Hargreaves, Marshall, & North, 2003). Their ability to understand and process information, however, has not kept pace with the voluminous resources now available to them (Esnard & Mohammed, 2019), which require a higher quality of thought (Kaur, Awasthy, & Syed, 2019). To address this imbalance and develop more ­reflective and engaged listeners, teachers should impart musical thinking skills instead of mere information. This chapter explores music listening practices, with particular attention to music listening pedagogy in the context of American music education in grades pre‐K–12. It begins with a description of the centrality of listening in music education, related teaching approaches, and curriculum development. It then addresses formal and informal student learning (i.e. learning both in and out of the classroom), providing an overview of music listening insights informed by music psychology. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications for music teaching and learning.

The Centrality of Listening in Music Education Music is an auditory art form. By definition, music is the way people organize or understand sound and silence (Blacking, 1973). While the foundation for music is human hearing, it is important to note that hearing is not listening. Listening requires cognitive engagement with sound (Johnson, 2017). Music is a necessarily cognitive activity and one based on human comprehension. From this basis, the fundamentals of music listening in music education naturally follow: “the ability to perceive sounds and to form thoughts about those sounds” (p. 240,

The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

292 Johnson Campbell & Scott‐Kassner, 2018). As a quintessential skill in music education, thoughtful listening is central to many if not all musical experiences (Kerchner, 2009; Reimer, 2003). For centuries, people relied on listening skills to transmit music from one generation to the next through the aural tradition. In fact, before the advent of mechanical recordings, all musical performances evaporated when the last note sounded. Following the invention of Edison’s phonograph in 1877, however, a series of ever‐advancing recording technology offered listeners an increased convenience and range of music listening possibilities. Consequently, listening activities have formed a central part of general music instruction dating back to the radio broadcasts of “Symphony Concerts for Young People” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Mark & Gary, 2007). The educational intention of these listening experiences grew from exposure to eventual appreciation of Western classical masterworks. Now, contemporary listeners enjoy a wealth of music using online streaming services and other digital formats. Because of the ubiquity of music in contemporary society (Hargreaves et al., 2003), listeners may take the accessibility of music for granted and thereby fail to recognize the value of music listening in their own lives. With the widespread establishment of general music education curricula in schools worldwide, and particularly in American public schools, twenty‐first‐century music educators have begun to incorporate transferrable thinking skills into their music listening instruction. As Haack wrote in 1992, “there remains a timely need for applied research into the three C’s of cognitive style, creativity, and critical thinking vis‐à‐vis music‐listening behaviors” (p. 462). A decade later, North, Hargreaves, and Tarrant (2002) advocated for a combination of qualitative and quantitative protocols to diversify research methods, in particular when investigating the effects of music listening on the individual level. Since then, researchers have utilized multimodal and multimedia data to investigate the music listening experience, including a range of artifacts that more fully illustrate listeners’ perspectives and interpretations (Tobias, 2014).

Curriculum Central to all other musical activities, music listening skills are a core feature of music education and, consequently, developing thoughtful listening skills is a key element of quality music education curricula. This is especially fitting for elementary‐aged or pre‐adolescent general music students, because their classroom music instruction is often focused less on developing performance skills or fine‐tuned instrumental/vocal techniques and more on delivering diverse and broadly‐applicable musical understandings (Abril, 2016). Music educators can integrate multiple activities and strategies through music listening to address a range of content standards. Those include singing, playing, improvising, composing and arranging, reading and notation, analyzing and evaluating, and making interdisciplinary connections. General music curricula typically include a variety of vocal, instrumental, and movement experiences designed to understand and explore the basic elements of music (Campbell & Scott‐Kassner, 2018). In practice, however, music educators often favor performance activities over thoughtful music listening in classrooms and ensembles. As Haack (1992) observed, “Listening is the fundamental music skill…Yet music listening is among the last and least studied aspect of music” (p. 451). One reason for this disconnect might be the propensity to regard music listening as a passive activity, without rigorous outcomes or corresponding assessment. Having students “just listen” to musical examples certainly lacks intention and direction. While hearing comes naturally to students, listening does not – at least not thoughtful music listening. Instead, effective music teachers impart music listening skills using a variety of pedagogical strategies to enhance students’ musical experiences and foster a greater understanding



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of music in general. Some of the ways educators have students learn to listen to music are didactic or teacher‐centered, while others are more creative and learner‐centered. The following subsections present an overview of both these approaches.

Teacher-Centered Instruction

Didactic or teacher-centered music listening instruction with definite right/wrong answers is familiar to many music students. The model reinforces factual knowledge and historical accuracy of music listening examples. Commonly used in musicology and music appreciation courses, instructors use guided music listening to conserve historically important lineage of musical developments. An example from Wright’s (2016, pp. 183–184) listening guide for the first movement of Mozart’s “Symphony No. 40 in G minor,” K 550 illustrates this approach: While the divisions within sonata‐allegro form are important to hear, in this movement Mozart wants to convey a feeling of anxiety, even despair, through his use of the minor mode and the “painful” half‐step theme. Exposition, 0:00–2:54 Development, 3:34–4:39 Recapitulation, 4:45–6:12 Coda, 6:51–6:56

This approach is common in many school settings: teachers present listening skills didactically and expect students to acquire specific, formal music vocabulary (Boal‐Palheiros & Hargreaves, 2001). Unfortunately, this type of instruction may actually discourage students from studying music (Williamson, 2005). As a counter‐balance to absorbing historical knowledge and learning about musical traditions didactically, it is important for students (and teachers) to expand their own musical horizons through continued music listening – seeking new musical expressions along ever‐unfolding musical trajectories. One example of a resource for active listening lessons is Listen Up! (Gault, 2016), which provides well‐designed lessons, ready for classroom use. Gault’s lessons are based on three key musical behaviors described by the National Core Arts Standards (State Education Agency Directors of Arts Education, 2016) and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (Persky, Sandene, & Askew, 1998): Creating, Performing, and Responding. Gault’s three‐part framework for active music listening instruction reflects this approach (p. xii): The Music Is the musical excerpt unique, artful, and interesting? Is it accessible to students? Are there prominent musical features to which students can listen and respond? The Learners What prior knowledge do they bring to this experience? How comfortable are they responding via active music channels to a listening excerpt? How comfortable are they with the genre of music being presented? The Experience Does it move from known material to new material? Does it prepare students to respond in active ways such as singing, moving, and certain? Is it musical and does it provide opportunities to participate in musically satisfying experiences with a given excerpt?

294 Johnson The teaching strategies evident in this framework guide the teacher to make strategic choices about both the musical material and related activities. The result is learner‐centered pedagogy that builds a foundation for conceptual understanding through active listening.

Learner-Centered Instruction

Another more creative and open‐ended approach to music listening is “Critical Thinking Instruction in Music” (Johnson, 2011). The goal of this method is to foster imaginative listening, critical listening, and creative thinking. This indirect instructional method takes a constructivist approach, honoring and encouraging listeners’ personal responses to musical experiences (Froehlich & Smith, 2017). Rather than promoting specific, formal terminology based on music theory to describe listening experiences, teachers using a learner‐centered approach foster thinking in musical contexts by using inquiry and analysis (Bamberger, 2000). Three categories of descriptors have naturally emerged from listener responses used to describe their musical experiences: musical terms, affective terms, extra‐musical associations (Johnson, 2003). This type of music listening pedagogy connects with listeners’ natural predisposition to create meaning and ­construct concepts from new experiences (Hunt, 1982). It promotes higher order thinking skills using a learner‐centered approach to music listening and music education. Consisting of open‐ended and analytical questions, Johnson’s (2011) “Critical Thinking Instruction in Music” is a set of 16 lessons based on thought‐provoking questions embedded in more traditional music listening instruction. Johnson’s approach builds upon Stauffer’s six‐part Listening Sequence (see Campbell & Scott‐Kassner, 2018). See below for each step and its description: Step 1: Prepare: The teacher provides listeners with instructions in preparation of listening for particular musical events. Step 2: Listen: The teacher plays a high‐quality audio recording, and checks for students’ ­perception or feelings through class discussion. Step 3: Activate and Participate: The teacher provides repeated listening experiences that actively involve students via response activities (e.g. performing or moving to the music). With ­repetition, these exercises reinforce both the listening skills and the auditory experience. Step 4:  Question and Discuss: Classroom discussions address the music listening experience, response activities, or emotional responses to the activities or the music itself. Step 5: Listen Again: Students listen to the recording quietly, noticing familiar moments, ­expanding insight into the music, and reestablishing the work as a whole. Step 6: Extend the Listening: The teacher uses this listening experience as a stimulus to have ­children listen to other music with similar or contrasting characteristics, as an opportunity for reflective thinking and critical listening.

Johnson’s (2011) approach uses this listening sequence to encourage divergent thinking about musical experiences, while combining that process with the standard terminology of Western classical music. Table  18.1 provides an example of this instruction, with the steps labeled “1a” and “5a” being examples of open‐ended, critical thinking questions: Both Gault’s (2016) and Johnson’s (2011) approaches center on active involvement with music listening experiences. Moving from active involvement through iconic representation to symbolic terminology builds conceptual understanding in a sequential fashion (Campbell & Scott‐Kassner, 2018). Both of these examples of enactive listening pedagogy require attention and focus during multiple directed listening experiences focused on musical structures and engagement through active participation in response activities while listening (Campbell, 2004). Music listening can range from passive background listening to intense focused listening. Active listening or deep listening comes with a focus on musical elements such as tonal and



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Table 18.1  An example of critical thinking instruction. Step

Action

1

Play the recording. Tell students to listen for places where the music is louder and softer.

1a

Ask students: What did you notice about the loudness or volume of the music? When did some notes “stand out” of the music? How would you describe what you heard?

2

Tell students that there are differences in the loudness or volume in this music. Changes in volume are called “dynamics.”

3

Tell students that when orchestras or bands play, usually a conductor directs the musicians and makes different movements or movement patterns to show the volume of the music. With a baton, demonstrate these movements.

4

Distribute a conductor’s baton to each student. Play the recording again while demonstrating a conducting pattern. Have students follow your conducting motions.

5

Play the recording again, and have students improvise their own conducting motions to show the dynamics.

5a

Ask students: How did the volume of this music change? How did you show that in your conducting? How did you show notes that “stood out” in your conducting?

6

Tell students that in music, dynamics can change gradually or suddenly. When the music gets quieter, it is called a “decrescendo” and when it gets louder, it is called a “crescendo.” Sudden loud notes are called “accents.”

7

Play the recording again and have students make up their own conducting motions to show how the volume changes with their baton. Pause the recording, invite students to take turns leading the class, and resume the recording.

rhythm patterns, musical format, musical tone and colors, the timbre of the component sounds. Teachers practice deep listening pedagogy when using activities for attentive listening, engaged listening, and enactive listening (Campbell & Scott‐Kassner, 2018). These activities move from general to specific questions, from global to granular, and from less to more sophisticated. For example, asking listeners to describe the musical experience in general terms to someone who had not heard the example, with more detailed follow‐up questions about what in the music informed their description, and what purpose or occasion best fits the music. This approach also parallels sequenced attentive, engaged, and enactive music listening activities for world music pedagogy (Campbell, 2016).

Listening and Learning As discussed above, musical experiences involve a range of cognition. While the typical conservatory or imitative model of musical transmission may produce highly‐accurate technicians focused on replicating their teachers’ note‐perfect performances (Whitaker, 1996), music listening activities can provide occasions for multi‐faceted cognition. Learners demonstrate a wide range of cognitive processes about musical examples after listening experiences that are both dependent on (Bundra, 1993) and independent of (Richardson, 1998) age/­developmental level. Table 18.2 provides examples derived from the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). Music teacher‐educators often criticize general music instruction that consists of entertaining activities without a sufficient focus on learning. Instead, guided music listening pedagogy linked to the educational objectives above, provides an effective and accessible opportunity for thought‐provoking and meaningful instruction. As students reflect on their

296 Johnson Table 18.2  Cognitive level, example tasks, and music listening applications. Cognitive level

Tasks

Music listening applications

1. Remember

Recognize, recall

Identify sound of a theme or rhythm.

2. Understand

Interpret, compare, explain

Compare sound of two themes, explain the similarities shared by different phrases.

3. Apply

Use, carry out

Explain reasoning to select specific musical examples to accompany non‐musical purposes.

4. Analyze

Organize, deconstruct

Explain component parts of a large work or complex ensemble.

5. Evaluate

Check, critique

Offer informed opinions about given musical examples based on performance criteria.

6. Create

Generate, construct

Write a script or create a visual representation based on a musical example; explain the musical evidence used to justify those choices.

own thinking, they necessarily use such higher‐order thinking skills (e.g., hypothesizing, comparing, analyzing, evaluating, and creating). In musical settings, corresponding activities provide opportunities to demonstrate musical understanding and listening skills. These translate most directly when teachers facilitate activities that encourage students to think about their musical experiences. Using the factual, conceptual, and metacognitive domains (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001), this type of instruction not only enhances students’ musical engagement, it also provides teachers with more definite data to meet their assessment expectations (Hanna, 2007). Because music listening is a covert or non-observable act, assessing students’ listening presents challenges for teachers. Instead, assessment measures often include observable actions such as verbal descriptions, writing prompts, or movement activities that demonstrate what listeners perceive. One example is Johnson’s (2011) “Listening and Thinking” measure, based on prompts and multiple‐choice suggestions from the “Music Responding Block” of the 1997 NAEP Arts Report Card (Persky et al., 1998). Students listen to four musical selections and answer 12 questions. Following each musical example, they answer two close‐ended and two open‐ended questions addressing its possible uses and its instrumentation. The first two questions are: Q 1a. Where might you hear this music? a) At a funeral. b) For a lullaby. c) At a parade. d) At a dance. Q 1b. What did you hear in the music that helped you make your choice? Q 2a. How many instruments do you hear in this music? a) Only one. b) Two. c) Three. d) More than three. Q 2b. How would you describe the instruments you hear in this music? The third and fourth questions are identical to the first two questions, applied to a different musical example. For the fifth and sixth questions, students listen to the first and second musical examples again and compare and contrast those examples as follows:



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Q 5a. What is different about these two pieces of music? a) The speed of the music. b) The style of the music. c) The instruments used to make the music. d) Tll of the above. Q 5b. What did you hear in the music that helped you make your choice? Q 6a. How do these two pieces of music compare? a) They are almost the same. b) They are a little the same. c) They are a little different. d) They are very different. Q 6b. What did you hear in the music that helped you make your choice? The measure continues with questions 7 though 12, which repeat the first six questions, with a different pair of musical listening selections. The paired musical examples encourage students’ critical thinking, using resources of relevant knowledge, concepts, and experiences. The multiple‐choice section in each question provides a prompt for listeners to facilitate writing the open‐ended responses. While the multiple‐choice answers are not scored, teachers use a word‐count method to score the open‐ended writing response. Consistent with related research on musical terms, affective terms, and associative terms (Johnson, 2003), this approach measures students’ reflections on the musical examples instead of their success in finding “correct” answers. It encourages listeners to think reflectively about their listening experiences and to make that thinking evident. As a result, they learn reflectively in two ­fundamentally different ways: by making connections with their own emotional responses and associations to prior knowledge, and by articulating their understanding of the musical elements they experience during their music listening examples. It is a challenge for music educators to develop and present student-centered music listening activities that are engaging, informative, and enjoyable (Kerchner, 2009). When music educators engage students in music listening experiences, it results in enhanced participation, involvement, and imagination. This challenge also represents an opportunity for educators to promote twenty‐ first‐century skills. Chief among these skills are the “4 C’s” – collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, and communication (Trilling & Fadel, 2009). Among the implications of listening skills and general aural skills is the realization that attentive and critical listening skills are necessary pre‐requisites for the twenty‐first‐century skills of collaboration and communication, among others.

Critical Thinking An omnipresent term in academic and education literature (Petress, 2004; Richardson, 1998), “critical thinking” is “reasonable reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do [with newly acquired information]” (Ennis, 1991, p. 1–2). As applied to music listening, the processes of comparing, evaluating, reflecting, judging, and classifying musical experiences provide evidence of critical thinking (Bundra, 1993; Richardson, 1998) and encompass elements of both transferable and subject‐specific thinking skills (Woodford, 1995). Depending on the method of instruction, music listening can directly relate to critical thinking, as listeners may demonstrate analysis, evaluation, and creativity. These levels correspond to the highest forms of cognition in the Revised Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001), requiring listeners to apply prior knowledge and interpret their own experiences.

298 Johnson

Collaboration Music is a collaborative activity. Although some musicians make music alone, music itself is a social activity; people primarily engage in musical activities with others (Froehlich & Smith, 2017). By listening, musicians collaborate non‐verbally to craft cohesive performances and spontaneously exchange musical ideas. Particularly in chamber music or small ensemble settings, music listening skills are a key form of immediate and active collaboration (Cangro, 2016). These skills apply to both musical and non‐musical contexts. For example, in combined collaborative and critical thinking tasks, students demonstrate significant improvements in their listening skills by identification of musical t­exture, genre, and musical style (Smialek & Boburka, 2006). Addressing transferrable problem‐ solving skills (Norris, 2004), these collaborative listening exercises result in more active and engaging effects as compared with traditional lectures and occasional group work.

Communication Music listening is a primal form of non‐verbal communication through which musicians convey ideas (Kokotsaki & Hallam, 2007). More importantly, musical communication also occurs when composers impart their ideas to listeners through the medium of skilled ­performers. As one of the ten functions of music (Merriam, 1964), communication is chief among its purposes. Because music is an auditory art form, communicating its meaning through sound is a key feature of all musical experiences. Music is a versatile and convincing medium of communication, creating subjective experiences that invite listeners to form their own interpretations (Langer, 2009). With or without words, music is a powerful force with a range of expressive elements such as melody, harmony, form, timbre, texture, rhythm, and dynamics. These offer composers, arrangers, and performers a wide range of tools with which to communicate their ideas to their audiences.

Creativity Music listening is a creative activity. By imaginatively and thoughtfully listening to music, students can develop their own interpretations of their musical experiences. Experiencing and perceiving music are inherently subjective activities. By articulating their own interpretations and assigning values to the music, listeners create meaning from their own musical experiences as they reflect on the experience. Ironically, of all the arts, music is often taught the least creatively (Fowler, 1996). Engaged and interactive music listening pedagogy is an important and promising tool for promoting thoughtful music curricula and developing students’ musical independence. Discussion, active music‐making, and reflection are all ways to facilitate meaningful connections while listening to music. Using these methods to develop more creative and student‐centered approaches, teachers can engage students to provide inventive and meaningful music listening experiences that extend beyond the classroom. Voluntary music listening in extracurricular settings demonstrates intrinsic motivation and encourages life‐long learning in music (Kokotsaki & Hallam, 2007). Because of the disconnect between in‐school and extra‐curricular music listening repertoire, however, music listening skills developed in school curricula do not necessarily translate to music experiences beyond the classroom (Hedden, 1981). Instead of the analytical skills ­promoted by established curricula, repeated exposure to musical examples is critical to develop a sense of ownership – both at school and elsewhere (Wright, 2016). Experiencing the same or similar music in formal and informal situations reinforces the importance and retention of that music.



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Implications: Music Psychology From a psychological perspective, research on the extra‐musical effects of music listening experiences has focused on four areas: adolescents’ beliefs and behaviors, consumer behaviors, simultaneous tasks, and health or wellness (North et  al., 2002). Most applicable to music education is research investigating the influence of popular music on adolescent learners’ beliefs and behaviors. Relating to a range of social and identity issues, popular music is generally extra‐curricular and experienced in informal settings. The so‐called “Mozart Effect” is one area of music and learning that received much attention. This effect describes how passive music listening increases spatial‐temporal reasoning (Rauscher, Shay, & Ky, 1993, 1995). In general, a closer examination of this effect has shown it to be inconsistent and short‐lived, leading most scholars to conclude that passive music listening does not increase intelligence (Schellenberg, 2005). Subsequent investigations, however, suggest a relationship between listening to a particular musical genre and extra‐musical outcomes (Schellenberg & Hallam, 2005). More specifically, listeners regularly choose music to regulate their emotions and alter their moods (Hargreaves & North, 1999). The affective or emotional reaction of the listener is a determining factor regarding the potential cognitive benefits of the music listening experience. Listeners most often demonstrate the cognitive benefits of music listening when they enjoy the musical experience, suggesting a positive relationship between the affective and cognitive components of the experience. As such, music has a far‐reaching potential to alter listeners’ frame of mind. While simply listening to music does not enhance cognitive ability, studies have found that actively engaging in musical activities (e.g. making music, responding to music, and attentively listening to music) does have positive effects on non‐musical intellectual abilities (Johnson & Davis, 2016; Johnson, 2007). In these studies, ensembles‐in‐residence provided interactive music education presentations that engaged students in music listening experiences as well as responsive activities. By studying students’ growth in measures of spatial intelligence, researchers report the extra‐musical benefits of these experiences. They also assert that heightened listening skills may potentially enhance auditory learning in non‐music subjects. Because auditory learning is one of the main presentation modalities in educational practice (Campbell & Scott‐Kassner, 2018), enhancing students’ listening skills has far‐reaching implications. Furthermore, teachers and school administrators report that enhanced music listening skills have a transferrable and positive impact on student success in general (Abril & Gault, 2008). For example, Haack (1992) explored the relationship between music listening pedagogy and English language arts (i.e., spoken and written English) via embedded activities used to describe listening experiences. Verbal response to music listening is a valuable form of data about music education processes (e.g., cognition, creativity, and critical thinking; Haack, 1992). Following Haack’s study, researchers have analyzed verbal data and found that teachers could aid students’ perceptive listening skills through musical instruction. For example, Flowers (2000) found that listeners most often used images, analogies, or descriptors that were not inherently musical to describe music (i.e. emotional, temporal, and metaphorical terms). She suggested that such descriptors were effective ways of focusing students’ attention during music listening. Students are able to describe their own thoughts while listening to music, to make and express judgments about the music, and to articulate their ideas about the listening process (Bundra, 1993). Even though verbal data may not reliably yield a complete understanding of the listener’s experience, the acts of speaking, listening, and writing about music represent a process of discovery; each action also provides a measurable product of music listening experiences. In response to listening and other musical experiences, student word choices demonstrate cognitive focus, thinking styles, and attributed meanings (Tausczik & Pennebaker, 2010).

300 Johnson Verbal descriptors also have predictive value when students use them to reflect on learning experiences (Abe, 2009) and are valid measures of emotional expression (Kahn, Tobin, Massey, & Anderson, 2007). In addition, Kerchner (2000) found that “verbal responses provided the foundation for all children’s visual and kinesthetic responses” (p. 32).

Conclusion As noted earlier, music listening is a ubiquitous feature of contemporary society. It is a powerful form of non‐verbal communication that carries both overt and covert messaging that reaches listeners on cognitive, psychomotor, and affective levels. As a proto‐language (Mithen, 2006), music was a precursor to modern languages for prehistoric civilizations and now contributes prosaic elements to spoken communication, adding meaning to words through dynamic, cadence, inflection, and rhythm (Whitley, 2017). Music is also inextricably linked to the act of listening. As Campbell and Scott‐Kassner (2018) argued, “Of all the musical abilities teachers try to help children develop, the ability to listen with focus and insight is perhaps the most important and long‐lasting” (p. 239). Activities that promote significant and meaningful music learning should ideally form the basis for general music instruction. Effective music listening enhances students’ understanding and enjoyment of music. By honoring listeners’ feelings and thoughts expressed through the medium of music (Tait & Haack, 1984), educators can foster meaningful learning. A constructivist approach allows students to satisfy their need to make meaning of their own musical experiences (Wiggins, 2001) and to practice higher‐order thinking skills (Sheldon & DeNardo, 2005). Developing the resulting reflective understandings of music aligns with the primary purpose of education: the development of thought processes instead of accumulating information (Whitehead, 1929/1967). Listening thoughtfully to a variety of music embedded in engaging pedagogical practices is an essential element in that instruction.

References Abe, J. (2009). Words that predict outstanding performance. Journal of Research in Personality, 43, 528–531. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2009.01.010 Abril, C. R. (2016). Untangling general music education. In C. Abril & B. Gault (Eds.), Teaching ­general music (pp. 51–22). New York: Oxford. Abril, C. R., & Gault, B. M. (2008). The state of music in secondary schools: The principal’s perspective. Journal of Research in Music Education, 56, 68–81. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022429408317516 Anderson, L. W., & Krathwohl, D. R. (Eds.) (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. White Plains, NY: Longman. Bamberger, J. (2000). Developing musical intuitions. New York: Oxford. Blacking, J. (1973). How musical is man? Seattle: University of Washington Press. Boal‐Palheiros, G. M., & Hargreaves, D. J. (2001). Listening to music at home and at school. British Journal of Music Education, 18, 103–118. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265051701000213 Bundra, J. (1993). A study of music listening processes through the verbal reports of school‐aged ­children. Dissertation Abstracts International (UMI No. 9415701). Campbell, P. S. (2004). Teaching music globally. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Campbell, P. S. (2016). World music pedagogy. In C. Abril & B. Gault (Eds.), Teaching general music (pp. 89–111). New York: Oxford. Campbell, P. S., & Scott-Kassner, C. (2018). Music in Childhood Enhanced: From Preschool through the Elementary Grades. Cengage Learning. Cangro, R. (2016). Student collaboration and standards‐based music learning: A literature review. Update: Applications of Research in Music Education, 34, 63–68. https://doi.org/10.1177 %2F8755123314568794



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302 Johnson North, A. C., Hargreaves, D. J., & Tarrant, M. (2002). Social psychology and music education. In R. Colwell & C. Richardson (Eds.), The new handbook of research on music teaching and learning (pp. 604–625). New York: Oxford. Persky, H. R., Sandene, B. A., & Askew, J. M. (1998). The NAEP 1997 Arts Report Card. Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics. Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/ nationsreportcard/pubs/main1997/1999486r.aspx Petress, K. (2004). Critical thinking: An extended definition. Education, 124 , 461–466. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. EJ698515.) Rauscher, F. H., Shaw, G. L., & Ky, K. N. (1995) Listening to Mozart enhances spatial‐temporal reasoning: Towards a neuropsychological basis. Neuroscience Letters, 185, 44–47. https://doi.org/ 10.1016/0304‐3940(94)11221‐4 Rauscher, F. H., Shaw, G. L., & Ky, K. N. (1993). Music and spatial task performance. Nature 365, 611. https://doi.org/10.1038/365611a0 Reimer, B. (2003). A philosophy of music education: Advancing the vision (3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice‐Hall. Richardson, C. (1998). The roles of the critical thinker in the music classroom. Studies in Music from the University of Western Ontario, 17, 107–120. Retrieved from https://openmusiclibrary.org/ links/078bddb8‐242e‐4917‐af2d‐301dd92b251e/. Schellenberg, E. G. (2005). Music and cognitive abilities. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14, 317–320. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0963‐7214.2005.00389.x Schellenberg, E. G., & Hallam, S. (2005). Music listening and cognitive abilities in 10‐ and 11‐year‐olds: The blur effect. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1060, 202–209. https://doi. org/10.1196/annals.1360.013 Sheldon, D. & DeNardo, G. (2005). Comparisons of higher‐order thinking skills among prospective freshmen and upper‐level preservice music education majors. Journal of Research in Music Education, 53, 40–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/002242940505300104 Smialek, T. W., & Boburka, R. R. (2006). The effect of cooperative listening exercises on the critical listening skills of college music‐appreciation students. Journal of Research in Music Education, 54, 57–72. https://doi.org/10.1177/002242940605400105 State Education Agency Directors of Arts Education (2016). National core arts standards. Retrieved from http://nationalartsstandards.org/ Tait, M., & Haack, P. (1984). Principles and processes of music education. New York: Teachers College Press. Tausczik, Y., & Pennebaker, J. (2010). The psychological meaning of words: LIWC and computerized text analysis methods. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 29, 24–54. https://doi. org/10.1177/0261927X09351676 Tobias, E. (2014). Collecting, generating, and analyzing multimodal and multimedia data. In C. M. Conway (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of qualitative research in American music education (pp. 288–306). New York: Oxford University Press. Trilling, B., & Fadel, C. (2009). 21st century skills: Learning for life in our times. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Wade, B. C. (2004). Thinking musically: Experiencing music, expressing culture. New York: Oxford. Whitaker, N. L. (1996). A theoretical model of the musical problem solving and decision making of ­performers, arrangers, conductors, and composers. Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, 128, 1–14. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40318784 Whitehead, A. N. (1929/1967). The aims of education and other essays. New York: Free Press. Whitley, R. (2017). Examination of the cross‐disciplinary connection and cross‐disciplinary integration of ESL and music pedagogies. In G. B. Teh & S. C. Choy (Eds.) Empowering 21st century learners through holistic and enterprising learning (pp. 189–196). Singapore: Springer. Wiggins, J. (2001). Teaching for musical understanding. Boston: McGraw Hill. Williamson, S. J. (2005). “My music”: The music making and listening experiences of seventh and eighth graders not enrolled in school music ensembles. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Washington, Seattle, WA. Woodford, P. G. (1995). Critical thinking in music. Canadian Music Educator, 37, 36–40. Wright, R. (2016). Informal learning in general music education. In C. Abril & B. Gault (Eds.), Teaching general music: Approaches, issues, and viewpoints (pp. 209–237). New York: Oxford.

19

Training and Development Judi Brownell

Effective listening enables employees to accomplish tasks, reduce mistakes, and coordinate activities. It also cultivates strong interpersonal relationships and facilitates teambuilding (Rhee, Hur, & Kim, 2017). Recent research indicates that listening fosters a range of ­behaviors related to compassion, genuine caring, and organizational citizenship, all of which have positive impacts on both employee satisfaction and effectiveness (Friedman & Gerstein, 2018; Macnamara, 2017). In addition, listening is the vehicle through which organizational goals are developed, shared, and accomplished, whether the aim is to improve internal decision making or to enhance customer service experiences. I begin this chapter by introducing training and development activities as both a means of assisting employees in meeting their personal listening goals and as an approach to creating and maintaining an organizational culture where listening is valued. As part of this section, I explore listening as an individual competence as well as a more encompassing process that facilitates the daily interactions of organizational members. Next, I examine the role that training and development plays in achieving these outcomes by first outlining the unique characteristics of adult learners. I then introduce the HURIER model – a behavioral approach to listening training that frames listening as a set of interrelated skills – and describe two approaches organizations can use to improve listening effectiveness: problem‐based learning and assessment centers. Finally, I examine the importance of a strong listening environment to sustaining acquired listening skills and fostering continuous employee development.

Training and Development Activities The training and development function serves as one of the most effective and proven ­activities for enhancing individual level performance consistent with an organization’s broader human resource goals (Bell, Tannenbaum, Ford & Noe, 2017; Masoumi, Hatami, & Pourkaremi, 2019). Several characteristics distinguish training and development from other learning ­contexts (Guan & Frenkel, 2019; Glynn, de Burca, & Brannick, 2003): ●●

Training and development arises from previously identified needs and objectives consistent with the organization’s mission and vision.

The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

304 Brownell ●●

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New hires are socialized to better understand the organization’s values and are empowered – often through training and development activities – to become responsive team members. Training and development supports the acquisition of new skills that can be applied to current or anticipated job requirements.

Training and development activities are generally designed to meet the needs of adult learners. Employees are busy, often distracted, and desire clear connections between what they are learning and how it will enhance their current job or advance their career. While students in academic environments often take the position that the “professor knows best,” employees are likely to have the experience needed to critically assess the usefulness of their training. This experience may also influence their attitudes toward training content as well as their view of the training itself (Cornelius, Gordon, & Ackland, 2011). Research indicates that adult learners prefer (Karge, Philips, Jessee, & McCabe, 2011): ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●●

experiential activities, opportunities to collaborate with peers, self‐direction in the classroom, opportunities to apply past work experiences to the training event, ability to see clearly identified improvement in performance, and a results‐orientation in all aspects of the training experience.

As we address the challenges of listening training, these requirements will guide our thinking about the most appropriate way to conceptualize listening as well as the most effective methods for achieving measurable results.

Developing Listening Competence The unique characteristics of the organizational environment and the special needs of adult learners have implications for how listening is conceptualized, learned, and assessed. Listening in organizations is both a learning outcome for individual members as well as an essential communication channel. I first focus on the individual employee and how listening is most productively approached to improve job performance. Then, I explore how listening environments can be created and sustained so that the organization itself realizes the benefits of effective listening (Brownell, 2008). Training and development is a powerful means of helping employees become more “competent” listeners. To date, however, there has been no definitive conceptual framework by which to judge an individual’s listening ability. In some cases, listening competence refers to a single construct that is holistically assessed; in other situations, listening is framed as a multidimensional process involving a number of related cognitive components (Worthington, 2017). Even when listening models are largely skill‐based, the behaviors used as evidence of effective listening are visible indicators of a largely unobservable process (Bodie, 2018). In addition, judgments of effectiveness are frequently based on the observer’s perceptions (Bostrom, 2011; Purdy, 1997). Like other communication competencies, listening can profitably be viewed from a behavioral perspective and, in this case, framed as a cluster of related skills (Latham, 1989). Employees, then, become more effective listeners through deliberate training interventions that modify existing habits and patterns of behavior on one or more of these dimensions. To establish program goals, trainers seek definitions of listening that can readily be operationalized and applied to organizational settings. Because adult learners want to perform more effectively on the job, trainers need to create and deliver results‐oriented programs where target outcomes and assessment measures are clearly defined (Brownell, 2012).



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Assessment, however, is challenging. For one, judgments of effective listening vary with the context; the meaning of “doesn’t listen” differs from one department and one company to the next. While some organizational members might view frequent meetings and memos as time consuming and tedious, others may see these activities (and their associated listening skills) as a means of facilitating employee involvement and information sharing. Individual backgrounds, goals, and expectations also play a role in determining how listening behaviors are perceived and interpreted. Clearly, it would be helpful if researchers and trainers had a shared and consistent view of the listening process  –  one that would provide a starting point for assessing participant needs, developing instructional materials, and measuring training results. As the workforce continues to become more diverse, challenges to identifying the most essential listening behaviors – and finding effective ways to strengthen and maintain them – will continue to surface.

The HURIER Model of Listening One example of a behavioral approach, developed within an organizational context, is the HURIER listening model. This six‐component model originated in response to the need for more precise information about employees’ perceptions and subsequent assessments of their manager’s listening effectiveness. An employee satisfaction survey administered at a public utilities company revealed that employees were particularly unhappy with their managers’ listening. The lack of precision regarding employees’ complaints, however, made it difficult to identify specific listening weaknesses or to establish meaningful training goals. A follow‐up survey asked employees to define exactly what they meant when they said their manager “didn’t listen.” While some explained that their manger “looks down at the floor when she speaks to me,” others said that after explaining a problem and being promised a resolution, no action was taken. Still others reported that their manager always seemed distracted and preoccupied, engaged in some other activity while she spoke. This perception led them to the conclusion that she “wasn’t really listening” to what they had to say. The conceptual framework that emerged from survey results  –  the HURIER listening model – has since been used by trainers to identify the specific behaviors employees associate with listening effectiveness (Brownell, 1990, 1994). The HURIER model suggests that six interrelated listening components: Hearing, Understanding, Remembering, Interpreting, Evaluating, and Responding, can be taught as separate skill areas. Each area, or component, consists of a cluster of skills that can be mastered to achieve desired outcomes. Depending on the learner’s needs and the listening context, one or more components of the model can be targeted for training purposes. That is, while some employees may regularly Evaluate messages in order to make key decisions, other organizational members may be focused on counseling and coaching, which requires empathy and the skill set related to Interpreting messages. Table 19.1 presents each component of the HURIER model along with sample listening outcomes. Because outcomes are behavioral, trainers can determine which of the six components of listening they want to emphasize and select appropriate instructional strategies to develop the associated skills. Assessment measures can be developed to correspond directly with the targeted outcomes, overcoming the common concern that instruction and assessment are poorly aligned. The results of training, then, are clearly identified and can readily be put into practice (Brownell, 2018, 2019). A main advantage of behaviorally‐based conceptual models like HURIER is that they allow for both pre and post assessment. It is not unusual for a needs analysis to reveal that an individual “doesn’t listen,” but on a Likert scale of 1 (poor) to 10 (excellent), what does a rating of 3 mean to a trainer seeking to improve an employee’s performance? If training

306 Brownell Table 19.1  Skill components and sample outcomes associated with the HURIER behavioral listening model. H – Develop hearing and concentration Listening outcome: Focus attention on the right things Listening outcome: Don’t get distracted Listening outcome: Hear the message accurately U – Increase understanding, especially in diverse environments Listening outcome: Meet the challenge of individual differences Listening outcome: Learn about everything you can Listening outcome: Identify key points R – Improve memory Listening outcome: Recognize individual factors that affect memory Listening outcome: Remember names and other short‐term information Listening outcome: Improve your long‐term memory I – Interpret the message accurately by accounting for speaker and situational variables Listening outcome: Develop empathy by recognizing individual differences Listening outcome: Develop social sensitivity for perceptive empathy E – Evaluate what you hear Listening outcome: Analyze speaker credibility Listening outcome: Determine the ethical dimensions of the situation Listening outcome: Analyze evidence and reasoning R – Respond appropriately, understand this reflects the quality of your listening Listening outcome: Provide clear and direct feedback Listening outcome: Increase behavioral flexibility Listening outcome: Create a supportive communication climate

addresses listening holistically, its content and methods might not impact the specific ­behaviors leading to the judgment that a person is a poor listener. Asking a roomful of employees to “just listen!” is not likely to result in meaningful change. Behavioral models, on the other hand, allow for questions to be asked relative to each skill cluster. Does the listener follow through on what they promise? Do they appear distracted? Do they have strong pre‐conceived notions that interfere with fully considering a message? Do they give you their full attention when you speak? In this way, listening training can be targeted to address the behavioral components and associated skills that are most closely related to the desired outcomes. While skills‐based models are not without shortcomings, this approach appears to be one of the best suited to an observable, flexible, results‐oriented application (Brownell, 2008).

Improving Listening Effectiveness While organizations can use any number of approaches to improve listening effectiveness, two are highlighted below: problem‐based learning and assessment centers. Both focus on identifying and addressing skill deficits with the goal of improving employee relationships and organizational contributions.

Applying Problem‐based Learning to Listening Training A behavioral approach to listening has implications for creating the most effective instructional design. To change or adopt new behaviors, adult learners in organizational environments must be convinced that there’s a better approach than the one they’ve been using and that the new



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approach can readily be implemented with clear benefits. It is helpful to look at some of the ways in which learners can be motivated to embrace the instructional content and apply it to enhance their listening in the workplace. Before examining the role of organizational culture in supporting employees’ listening behavior, we first explore the challenge of meaningful training design (Chauhan, Ghosh, & Rai, 2017; Dorio, 2016). According to Burke and Hutchins (2008), three factors encourage the transfer of skills to on‐the‐job situations: 1. The use of relevant examples. 2. Maximum similarity between the training setting and the job environment. 3. A sufficient amount of practice in the relevant skill areas. Problem‐based learning (PBL) is a training method that has direct application to adult learners and significant potential for realizing an organization’s listening goals. It is a powerful means of motivating behavioral change (Lohman, 2002) and, in this case, of facilitating listening skill development based on the components of the HURIER model. PBL generally arises from an open‐ended problem similar to what learners might encounter in the workplace. A team of learners engage in collaborative problem solving as they address a dilemma that has multiple solutions. Selection of the problem is based on desired training outcomes and presents a challenge that requires the involvement and expertise of all participants. This approach is particularly well‐suited to adult learners as it meets nearly all of the previously listed criteria for an effective training experience (Remedios, Clarke, & Hawthorne, 2008; Sockalingam & Schmidt, 2011). While more traditional instructional methods and activities such as case studies, simulations, and self‐assessments are also appropriate, becoming an effective listener requires more than simply identifying and practicing a particular listening skill. It requires that learners see the usefulness of what they are learning and know how to appropriately apply the behavior to achieve desired results. They need to be motivated to transfer newly learned behaviors to the workplace so that they can improve their performance. In the PBL context, listening becomes both a learning process and a learning outcome; that is, listening becomes a channel through which participants accomplish their problem‐solving task as well as the topic of the training itself. While PBL is distinctive in that the learner acquires knowledge, skills, and attitudes ­primarily through inquiry and exploration rather than direct instruction, trainers depend on their personal listening skills at all stages of the training process. To begin, the trainer must ­familiarize themself with the organizational context in which learners will apply their skills. They need to understand elements of the organization’s culture such as how employees are appraised and rewarded and the extent to which they are empowered. During the session itself, trainers not only provide information for understanding listening behavior but also act as a resource and a coach as learners grapple with often messy problems that have multiple approaches and solutions. Throughout the program, the trainer identifies specific listening skills as they are demonstrated, provides feedback to participants, and helps learners recognize the link between their listening behaviors and their success in addressing on‐the‐job challenges that arise. One of PBL’s primary benefits is that it facilitates meaningful behavioral change that results in long‐term learning rather than isolated skill development. Participants are required to bridge the gap between what they currently know or can do, and what they need to demonstrate, in order to solve the problem. Here again, trainers must be skilled listeners to help learners identify their own listening limitations. Guided by insights from the trainer, participants realize that they weren’t paying attention to the right things (Hearing), that they didn’t remember what someone said (Remembering), that they jumped to hasty conclusions (Evaluating), or that they overlooked the fact that a member was frustrated and upset (Interpreting).

308 Brownell The PBL approach is well‐suited to listening training for a number of reasons. In this context, listening skills are not an independent “add on” or topic of instruction; rather, listening competencies emerge directly from the team problem‐solving experience, and their link to performance is clearly established. Employees require listening skills to make things happen on the job; similarly, in the PBL environment, learners not only need to work productively in diverse teams, but they must also use good judgment and social sensitivity in applying their skills to the dilemmas they confront. Listening becomes critical to the problem‐solving process itself. Most educators are familiar with Bloom et al.’s (1956) three domains of learning – cognitive, affective, and behavioral. Using a real world problem as the focus for participant learning, all three types of learning outcomes can readily be achieved. In programs designed to address listening behavior, learners analyze a problem (cognitive) as they communicate with team members and identify their own listening competencies (behavioral). Through this process, participants become more aware of the affective components of listening; they are encouraged to monitor their own responses, to recognize how their teammate’s perceptions and motivations influence the group dynamic, to appreciate cultural differences, and perhaps even to identify ethical dilemmas (Brownell & Jameson, 2004; Yew & Schmidt, 2012). Learners apply their emotional intelligence as they recognize others’ viewpoints, empathize, and use alternative ways of thinking to reach a more workable solution (affective). While there has been criticism of behavioral approaches that address individual listening behaviors without consideration for the context in which they will be applied, PBL provides an integrated learning experience that encourages participants to develop their ability to put plans into action, to lead teams, to resolve conflict, to convince, to identify ethical issues, and to respond to the on‐going group dynamic. In this case, the trainer’s earlier description of the HURIER model guides participants in identifying which components of listening are required for the various activities in which they engage. Importantly, the trainer also helps learners assess their own behaviors to determine where further skill development would be beneficial. For instance, learners might analyze a staffing dilemma and determine that a change in shift hours would solve the problem. They would have needed to demonstrate skills in understanding, evaluating, and interpreting their colleagues’ messages. The problem‐ solving discussion would also increase learners’ awareness of the affective factors that influence their decision, such as employees’ potential fearfulness regarding the potential impact of the change as well as the desire to have their input solicited and valued.

Assessment of Listening Behavior

Trainers are responsible for establishing clear learning outcomes, designing the training experience, and assessing the extent to which goals were accomplished. Effective training is demonstrated by changes in learners’ cognitive, affective, or behavioral response. The challenge is how best to facilitate and assess both behavioral and affective dimensions of effective listening (Bodie, 2018). PBL addresses this need by suggesting that multiple methods be used to facilitate feedback when judging participant learning. These include: ●●

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Learners reflect continuously on how their backgrounds, past experiences, and personal styles influence their own and others’ perceptions of their listening behaviors. Trainers provide continuous feedback on the experiential aspects of the classroom activity, focusing on how listening effectiveness impacts the problem‐solving task and the team dynamics. Teams respond to and report on questions about their peers’ listening behaviors. Learners apply the HURIER model to write reflection papers on the development of their listening skills.

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Learners view and discuss videos of their team’s decision‐making process with special attention to how listening facilitated or blocked the process. Self and peer assessments provide additional feedback on the effectiveness of clearly ­identified listening behaviors.

Once again, the trainer’s role is critical to the effectiveness of listening assessment as they observe participants in action and then processes the experience related to conflict management, decision making, teambuilding, managing diversity, and other activities where listening is central. As the team processes its own performance, the ways in which listening facilitated other communication activities can again be identified. The role of listening as an integral component of nearly all other dynamic interpersonal processes then becomes clear. Training is concerned with achieving specified outcomes. While learning is assessed in the context of PBL, it is seldom graded as it is in a traditional classroom. A participant’s self‐ report is often an acceptable source of information regarding personal progress. Participants and supervisors can also be interviewed regarding the extent to which learners met personal and program goals. In addition, comprehensive and long range plans for continuing development can be built into the initial training design. Individual listening improvement is an important goal, but isolated skill development must be accompanied by assessments of the impact increased listening effectiveness has on job performance. While PBL has a high potential for facilitating skill transfer, it is still important to hold periodic feedback sessions to respond to the challenges participants confront when they apply their listening skills to the workplace. Incorporating additional feedback on listening competence into participants’ regular performance evaluation process provides further guidance to those who are committed to continuing their skill development.

Assessment Centers Assessment centers have been widely used to identify employee talent, select high‐potential individuals for key positions, and reinforce the organization’s vision and values within the context of a training and development activity (Melancon & Williams, 2006; Wolvin & Brownell, 2008). An assessment center enables a trainer and others to assess employees’ current skill levels as well as their readiness to take on increased responsibility. Similar to PBL, the center presents a group of selected employees with organization‐specific challenges and observes them “in action” – making decisions, handling diverse perspectives, and managing conflict. Center activities are based on specific organizational goals, values, and culture; that is, the problems posed to participants reflect challenges that the organization is either experiencing or anticipates. While PBL generally focuses on a single problem‐solving event, assessment center methods include a series of problem‐solving activities, simulations, cases, role plays, discussions, in basket exercises, and other experiential activities (Berger & Brownell, 1996; Brownell, 2005). A distinctive characteristic of an assessment center, then, is that instructional materials are tailored specifically to meet pre‐determined organizational goals. If an organization wanted their employees to demonstrate a more creative approach in their thinking, or if inclusiveness was a key value that required attention, the assessment center experience could be designed to assess these specific participant behaviors and accompanying attitudes. Employee development activities would be based on the nature and appropriateness of participants’ responses to the dilemmas posed. Did the learner’s behavior during a team activity reflect the value of inclusiveness? Did an employee show compassion when they role played a performance interview? In discussing a case study, did the learner recognize the importance of organizational citizenship behavior when a colleague needed someone to cover a shift?

310 Brownell Table 19.2  Example of behaviorally‐anchored rating scales for assessment centers. Listens effectively: 5. ____ Demonstrated effective listening behavior throughout the activity; warm and encouraging nonverbal cues (Interpreting), focused directly on the speaker (Hearing), appeared non‐judgmental and open to others’ ideas (Evaluating).   4. ____ Appeared to be an effective listener; nonverbal cues were positive and encouraging (Interpreting), asked relevant questions (Understanding).   3. ____ Appeared to listen during most of the activity, although was not engaged in parts of the conversation (Understanding) and did not build on other participants’ points (Remembering).   2. ____ Did not appear to be listening during much of the activity. Seemed preoccupied (Hearing); did not always respond to others’ ideas (Responding).   1. ____ Did not listen to group members during the activity. Nonverbal cues indicated lack of interest (Interpreting), appeared to have formulated opinions in advance of the discussion (Evaluating).

While assessment centers can elicit and assess a range of skills, they are particularly well‐ suited to observe the listening behaviors that emerge as participants interact with their peers. Once again, the assessment center approach provides an opportunity for listening to be embedded in real work contexts and to assess specific components of the HURIER model as they are demonstrated in a dynamic environment. Is the problem lack of understanding – poor listening among various departments – that is creating hard feelings, confusion, and duplication of effort? Or perhaps with the influx of international workers, the organization is looking for employees to model skills in interpreting messages – empathy and compassion? Whatever the case, real organization‐specific problems are provided to a team of participants who then discuss options. The decision‐making process provides an opportunity for assessors to judge participants’ listening effectiveness. Often, behaviorally‐anchored rating scales are used in  follow‐up conversations to provide participants with clear developmental feedback (see Table 19.2). Trained observers, often senior‐level role models, provide input on participants’ performance and help them identify the skills required to advance in the organization. After the program, a detailed individualized action plan is created for each participant. This plan outlines individual listening profiles and suggests how to best acquire or strengthen less well‐developed skills. In some cases, assessment centers serve as a selection tool for promotions or succession planning.

Creating Listening Environments No matter how many hours of listening training are delivered and no matter how successful an employee is at reaching targeted listening goals, it is imperative that the organizational culture support newly acquired behaviors. Without a supportive organizational climate, whatever behaviors were acquired during the training program will fade as the realities and constraints of the workplace become apparent. This makes the organization’s culture a key concern to trainers. Employees’ ability to sustain their newly acquired or enhanced skills, particularly with regard to their listening attitudes, is largely dependent upon the place in which they work and the colleagues they depend on to support their efforts. As previously mentioned, trainers need to become familiar with each specific organization to ensure that newly learned skills can be sustained. By talking with senior managers as well as



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participants’ colleagues, trainers can get a better idea of how easy or difficult skill transfer and maintenance might be for learners. They can also anticipate the types of listening challenges likely to arise. The term “listening environment” has been used to describe a culture in which managers listen to their employees and teammates listen to one another – where the skills developed in listening training are expressed and supported in daily activities. Strong listening environments can be enhanced through interventions that include training at all organizational levels. These supportive cultures are characterized by a concern for the individual employee’s well‐being as well as for the organization’s performance. By modeling behaviors that reflect a concern for their colleagues’ welfare as well as for accomplishing tasks, employees can foster listening as a key value whether at the team, department, unit, or corporate level (Johnston & Reed, 2017; Schramm, 2017). Strong listening environments promote a free and open exchange of ideas and information among all organizational members. When employees have access to information and believe that their ideas matter, they are more likely to take ownership of problems, actively engage in decision making, and seek ways to continue to develop themselves professionally (Hougaard & Carter, 2018). Perceptions of “service within” are strengthened as individuals recognize their colleagues’ needs and work to support them. The recent emphasis on compassion in the workplace is one clear outcome of a strong listening environment (Friedman & Gerstein, 2018); employees recognize that internal service is as important as serving an external customer or client. When employees feel that they are heard, by both their fellow team members and their supervisors, they are likely to feel more personally invested in the organization’s future and seek ways of making a contribution. This attitude fosters a greater receptiveness to new ideas and facilitates collaborative efforts like those experienced in their PBL listening training. Signs of a strong listening environment include managers’ walking the halls, open office doors, and active employee recognition programs. While specific employee behaviors and management policies contribute to the perception of the organization’s listening environment, these perceptions, once established, influence employees’ subsequent attitudes and behaviors. There are a number of questions that can be asked to determine the strength of an organization’s listening environment, including: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Is listening mentioned in the organization’s mission and vision statements? Do managers in the organization model effective listening behavior? Would diverse employees all say that they felt others listened to them? Do employees listen to each other? Do the goals of listening training and development support the organization’s priorities and plans?

The Future of Listening Training While studies continue to accumulate, additional evidence of the direct impact listening has on organizational effectiveness is needed if substantial resources are to be directed to listening training and development efforts. As mentioned earlier, listening facilitates other essential organizational processes. Employees need to solve problems, reduce conflict, and facilitate change. They need to lead teams, coach, and appraise performance. The development of individual listening skills is essential, but it is the ability of listening to facilitate other fundamental organizational processes that is most likely to gain attention. Trainers who understand the contributions effective listening makes to related organizational activities are well positioned to conduct training programs with high impact.

312 Brownell As scholars are beginning to recognize, our definition of what it means to listen becomes even more complex as the use of mediated communication increases (Keaton &Worthington, 2018). The listening environment of the future may change dramatically as employees rely more heavily on distance and other related technologies, not only for the training and development function but to accomplish a wide range of routine tasks. Listeners will confront challenges associated with cross cultural communication as well as ethical dilemmas brought about by different perspectives, norms, and values. As the world becomes more complex, the need for effective listeners will increase.

Conclusion Trainers have unlimited opportunity to exert a powerful and lasting impact on organizational effectiveness by focusing on listening at both the individual and organizational levels. Listening can be viewed as both the topic of training seminars and as the process that makes organizational life possible. Listening facilitates coordination and links individuals, teams, departments, and other organizational units. In the context of PBL, listening serves as both an individual skills‐based outcome as well as the process through which decisions are made and problems solved. There is no reason to doubt that listening effectiveness is one of the most significant attributes of successful organizations. Still, additional research is needed to provide evidence‐ based testament to the belief that listening training and development is a high priority activity that enhances the organization’s culture and impacts its bottom line. Reflecting on the remark of one human resource specialist, we can imagine that listening trainers send their learners off on a “hero’s journey.” That is, if equipped with the essential listening skills, motivation, and environment, all organizational members have something important to offer, something meaningful to contribute to their workplace. By focusing on both the behavioral and emotional dimensions of listening, trainers can create organizational heroes – employees who confront daily challenges with the skills to accomplish their tasks and the sensitivity to foster strong and supportive work relationships.

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Listening Education in the Medical Curriculum Helen Meldrum and Rebekah Apple

Research over the past two decades has reported that physicians listen to patients express their concerns for an average of between 11 (Ospina et al., 2019) and 23 seconds (Marvel, Epstein, Flowers & Beckman, 1999) prior to interrupting. These interruptions are likely not employed to demonstrate understanding or acknowledge patient concerns, but rather to present leading questions that encourage a quick “no” or “yes” response. While inter­ ruptions are enacted largely out of fear that taking time to listen to patients will actually diminish the doctor’s ability to perform clinical duties (Fortin, Dwamena, Frankel, Lepisto, & Smith, 2018) or that patients will talk endlessly (Keifenheim et al., 2015), uninterrupted patients actually talk only a few seconds longer than those who are interrupted (Marvel et al., 1999; Ospina et al., 2019). Consequently, interruptions not only discourage patients from fully telling their story, but they cause patients to conclude that their opinions and feelings do not matter. When patients are not listened to, they are less likely to continue care, adhere to medication regimen, and trust the medical system (Van Dulmen, 2017). When, however, patients are able to effectively share their perspective, quality of care improves (Haidet & Paterniti, 2003). In some ways, the concept of “training in listening” seems undeniable for medical educa­ tion. By the 1970s, almost all medical schools in the United States included some form of interviewing and interpersonal skills education in their curriculum (Baumal & Benbassat, 2008). In addition, over their career, physicians conduct an estimated 150000–200000 interviews (Kurtz, Silverman & Draper, 2005). This encouraging, albeit slow, evolution provided students with the opportunity to learn communication fundamentals, but did not focus specifically on how to listen well. Indeed, the concept of listening instruction, as a sep­ arate identifiable skillset, is difficult to trace in the medical education literature. For this chapter, we reviewed research from a variety of related instructional areas, including assessment practices, history‐taking, motivational interviewing, emotional intelligence, nar­ rative medicine, and unique features of the socialization process for physicians in training. A brief summary of our findings is presented here.

The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Assessment Practices Listening skills serve many functions in healthcare: from data‐gathering for diagnostic purposes, to adapting treatment plans, and as a means of strengthening the doctor‐patient relationship (see McKenna et al., this volume). As such, commentary on listening is often found within specific healthcare competencies. The American Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) provides one model of requisite abilities, identifying six core competencies medical students must master to graduate to residency. For instance, the competency, Interpersonal and Communication Skills, acknowledges the importance of active listening as a function of building relationships (Swing, 2007). Another compe­ tency, Professionalism, contains four sub‐competencies, one of which includes, but is not dedicated to, listening (NEJM, 2016). To evaluate the educational methods used to teach communication‐related competencies, in 1999, 21 invited experts, medical educators, and representatives from professional organiza­ tions drafted the Kalamazoo Consensus Statement at the Bayer‐Fetzer Conference on Physician–Patient Communication in Medical Education. A review of the similarities, differ­ ences, and metric properties of five existing communication skills assessment instruments (the Bayer Institute for Health Care Communication E4 Model, Three Function Model‐Brown Interview Checklist, Calgary‐Cambridge Observation Guide, Patient‐Centered Clinical Method, and SEGUE Framework) yielded communication components central to most clinical encounters: ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●●

build the relationship, open the discussion, gather information, understand the patient’s perspective, share information, reach agreement, and provide closure (Makoul, 2001).

Medical educators have used these guidelines to develop evidence‐based physician–patient communication skills curricula. The Kalamazoo report outlined methods of testing ­interpersonal communication skills with real or simulated patients, in live or recorded interactions, using checklists (observer ratings), patient surveys, and exams using written questions sometimes linked to stimuli such as a video vignettes (Gilligan et al., 2016). Later, the Kalamazoo Part II Report recommended even more specific methods for assessment, including ratings of direct observations and voice tone analysis, among others (Duffy, Gordon, Whelan, Cole‐Kelly, & Frankel, 2004). It is clear that listening education, as it might be defined by scholars of com­ munication studies, is a neglected area in medical school curricula, and yet the competency is important enough that there are required examinations of interpersonal skills. In response to a 2004 Institute of Medicine report, the National Board of Medical Examiners added the Step 2 Clinical Skills test to the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE). Most medical schools accredited by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) now require that students pass Step 2 prior to graduation (Paniagua, Salt, Swygert & Barone, 2018). This performance‐based assessment uses Standardized Patients (SPs), ­individuals who imitate the behaviors of actual patients, to facilitate the evaluation of three critical areas: Integrated Clinical Encounter, Communication and Interpersonal Skills, and Spoken English Proficiency. The Step 2 communication skills exam consists of 12 different patient scenarios with 15‐minute SP encounters. Professional SPs use specific checklists to rate the candidate’s oral communication, and then experienced physicians assess the adequacy of their written notes.



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The exam score is graded on a Pass/Fail basis, leaving many U.S. medical faculty displeased with the lack of additional commentary on communication skills performance (Burdick, Boulet, & LeBlanc, 2018). Criticism of the Step 2 process has also come from the medical student community who protest the inconvenience (only 5 test centers in the U.S.), cost (over $1200 not including transportation), and questionable value (lack of feedback inhibits future learning). There are complaints about demonstrating objective competency based on check­ lists that may incentivize inauthentic performances by medical students, who instead simply go through the motions of a patient‐centered encounter (Kwong, 2017). Some students have remarked that personal character traits, such as introversion, place certain i­ndividuals at a dis­ advantage in passing this test (Lui & Papageorgiou, 2018). A valid criticism, noted by Agius, Brown, Stratta, Hayden, and Baker (2017), is that the majority of the influential medical insti­ tutions, accreditors, and agencies evaluate empathy skills in an overly quantitative manner, which may not always be appropriate. However, advocates for the exam argue it has forced medical schools to expand curricula in interpersonal skills. In fact, most medical schools now administer similar objective, structured clinical examina­ tions (OSCEs), to students in their final year (Harden, Stevenson, Downie, & Wilson, 1975). The testing stations are configured in a circuit, consisting of simulated exam rooms through which all students rotate. The student’s performance is individually evaluated on the different patient scenarios presented at each station. These cases are often more complex than those used by the USMLE (Alvin, 2016). OSCEs have been the most commonly used assessment tool in medical schools since the 1980s and are generally believed to be reliable and feasible instruments for measuring clinical skills (Lee et al., 2018). Medical students themselves have also reported potent learning with OSCEs (Hanley, Gillespie, Zabar, Adams, & Kalet, 2019).

Problems with Implementing Listening Education Efforts to address educational gaps in the behavioral sciences within U.S. medical education are well intentioned, but weakened by problems in implementation (Kwong, 2017). The current medical education models incorporate communication training in the first two years of school, with limited opportunities for students to transfer skills from classroom to clinical practice. In addition, although numerous medical licensing and accreditation agencies require evidence of effective communication skills, a large intervention using pre‐ and post‐test cohort groups showed only a modest gain in student communication skills (approximately 5%) after a major effort to improve the curriculum in interpersonal expertise (Yedidia et al., 2003). More problematic, perhaps, is the omission of clear descriptions and rubrics to assess these skills. Indeed, there is no standardized use of valid, reliable skills measurement instruments implemented in the majority of medical schools in the U.S. or elsewhere (Setyonugroho, Kennedy, & Kropmans, 2015). Similarly, most articles reviewed for this chapter did not clearly differentiate between basic interviewing and other interpersonal communication applications (Keifenheim et  al., 2015). One senior medical educator summed up the problem bluntly: “Most of the published approaches to the teaching of communication suffer from being vague, teacher‐dependent, and non‐reproducible” (Headly, 2007, p. 912). Headly (2007) asserted that the current state of knowledge in medical communication skills instruction has fallen far behind other educational designs. For example, in their review of 15 contemporary medical communication assessment instruments, Schirmer et al. (2005) noted that variation in a number of factors (e.g., context, environment) complicate assessment con­ sistency. They evaluated instrument properties based on characteristics identified as important to physicians, with attention given to interview efficiency and the exploration of psychosocial issues. Lipkin and his colleagues (1984) suggested almost four decades ago that input from other fields, such as psychiatry and social work, would help advance these efforts, but there is

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little evidence to date that interdisciplinary collaborations are common. The proliferation of assessments demonstrates the value faculty assign to communication skills, yet the lack of stan­ dardization both in teaching and evaluating these skills is problematic.

Synopsis of Enduring Issues Despite consensus that listening is a critical element in healthcare, there is little agreement on the contextual nuances of listening, its processes, or what patients feel is important when it comes to being heard. For example, the often cited Calgary‐Cambridge Guide to the Medical Interview identifies situations in which active listening should be utilized, but does not pro­ vide a description of skillful listening from the patient’s viewpoint (Jagosh, Boudreau, Steinert, MacDonald, & Ingram, 2011). At the same time, patient perceptions are increasingly being assessed, with the wide‐spread use of private and public sector surveys asking patients how often their doctors “listened carefully” to them during a hospital stay (Chen, Zou, & Shuster, 2017), and whether they felt their clinicians communicated effectively, listened well, and showed respect (Presson et al., 2017). Communication deficits in medicine have created a highly commercialized listening and empathy training niche (e.g., the Institute for Healthcare Communication, the Cleveland Clinic’s Empathy and Innovation Summit, Empathetics, Inc., PatientWisdom, Inc.). As Novack and his colleagues (1993) found, however, even 20 years after the early shifts toward communication instruction, the content and approach had not been standardized, with wide variances in the quality and intensity of the medical school courses they surveyed. Moreover, while clinicians may attend these post‐graduate educational programs to further their knowledge, most have already received some form of basic listening skills or empathy training in medical school, although communication skills training still represents a very small portion of the overall educational content of medical school curricula. Further, ­communication skills are often taught years before students interact with patients. This is problematic, given that physicians build skills best through actual clinical experience (Sleight, 1995). Added to this, the specific methods used for instruction often vary widely. It is to these methods we now turn.

Instructional Methods Communication skills training for medical students manifests in a wide range of subtopics and formats, including face‐to‐face or self‐directed designs, audiovisual materials, e‐learning, and online options. Small discussion groups with real, standardized, or simulated patients are used with live role‐plays or feedback from recordings. Instructors may employ a number of tradi­ tional and non‐traditional methods to enhance the impact of communication skills training (Gilligan et al., 2016), and we summarize some of these efforts in this chapter.

Interviewing Although still under‐researched, training focused on interviewing skills appears to improve performance in relationship building, patient assessment, shared decision making, and time management (Yedidia et  al., 2003). Over the past 15 years, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) has sponsored task force groups to outline recommendations for clinical skills curricula. While these recommendations have stressed the importance of students being able to engage with a patient for the purposes of information gathering, providing guidance, and support, listening education as a distinct area of skills instruction is not



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­ ighlighted (Kollhoff, Owings & Cathcart‐Rake, 2017). And yet, when both skilled and h unskilled interviewers spend similar periods of time with patients, the former gather s­ ignificantly higher quality information (Lipkin, Quill & Napodano, 1984). The patient history‐taking interview is also an opportunity to identify concerns, explore issues relevant to the primary complaint, and educate patients about options. Originally published in 1974, Smith’s Patient Centered Interviewing – An Evidence‐based Method (Fortin et al., 2018) was the first textbook to introduce a comprehensive, behaviorally defined, evidence‐based method for teaching the medical interview. Components of the model include attentive listening, use of silence, neutral utterances, nonverbal encouragement, and obtaining data from nonverbal sources. Students are encouraged to develop an emotional focus, including empathic responses, with the acronym: NURS: Name, Understand, Respect, and Support. The teaching of interviewing has relied upon the use of SPs. Although the use of SPs is expen­ sive and time consuming, medical colleges utilize them often to provide students with practice in history‐taking and physical examination techniques (May, Park, & Lee, 2009). Technological advances have made it possible for medical students to practice skills with virtual patients (VP) as well. VPs can be created to present a range of clinical issues not possible for SPs (e.g., facial paralysis) and can be used for repetitive practice, offering a low pressure environment that allows students to make mistakes. Third‐year medical students expressed high levels of empathy with VPs, and that level of empathy is positively correlated with the length of their verbal response (Kleinsmith, Rivera‐Gutierrez, Finney, Cendan, & Lok, 2015). This result suggests that stu­ dents take their time to formulate a more elaborate response, when the pressure to respond quickly to a human is removed. Ironically, some medical students have expressed dissatisfaction with their inability to discern if the VP was actually listening to them (Johnsen et al., 2005)! Medical interviews are also impacted by electronic medical record keeping during consulta­ tions. Patients have complained of reduced eye contact, while medical educators are concerned about the lack of educational materials addressing how to integrate communication skills with new practices in electronic records (Duke, Frankel & Reis, 2013). In recent years, a more client‐centered approach to teaching the interview consultation has emerged. Motivational Interviewing (MI) applies to a wide range of behavioral issues in healthcare (Lundahl et al., 2013) and provides a means of addressing core interpersonal com­ munication competencies. Driven by the philosophy that behavior change is a shared endeavor, MI seeks to strengthen the likelihood of positive health changes from the patient, by making sure the interview uses open‐ended questions, affirms the patient’s responses, applies accurate reflections, and provides summaries when necessary (Madson, Loignon & Lane, 2009). MI uses reflective listening to convey empathy: The clinician pays attention to each statement uttered by the patient and then paraphrases the information and emotional tone to confirm understanding. Reflective listening in MI conveys warmth, respect, and active interest. Experienced MI faculty suggest training begin with viewing video recorded exemplars, fol­ lowed by many opportunities for skill practice (Edwards, Bannatyne, & Stark, 2018). Results from MI training have been positive. After receiving preliminary instruction and participating in role‐plays, medical students described increased confidence in promoting behavior change (Roman, Borges, & Morrison, 2011), regardless of whether they practiced with a professional SP or a peer (Poirier et al., 2004). White, Gazewood, and Mounsey (2007) found that with MI training, students were more comfortable discussing behavior change with patients and believed that MI is an important skillset for physicians to have, while Daeppen et al. (2012) reported that MI‐trained students had higher empathic reflection scores versus those in a control group. Large scale reviews lend support for the implementation of MI training in medical schools (Dunhill, Schmidt, & Klein, 2014). Given its widespread use by a variety of healthcare practitioners, it is not surprising that MI education has been added to several medical schools’ curricula.

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Emotional Intelligence Emotional Intelligence (EI) education has become incorporated into the curricula of many medical schools because this training is believed to contribute to teaching professionalism and communication skills (Cherry, Fletcher, O’Sullivan & Dornan, 2014). EI refers to people’s awareness of and ability to respond to their own emotions as well as emotions expressed by others (Goleman, 2000). The EI dimension of regulating emotions predicted good performance in courses on interpersonal sensitivity over three years of medical school (Libbrecht, Lievens, Carette & Côté, 2014). One school created a program for groups of students interested in fostering EI and developing leadership skills. Participants in this track reported feeling inspired to develop excellent physician‐patient relationships (Uchino et al., 2015). And while EI cur­ ricula in medical schools are offered in diverse formats, making direct comparisons difficult, a review by Satterfield and Hughes (2007) suggests EI training is generally effective at improving related communication skills. EI assessment has also been used as part of the admissions’ selec­ tion process by some medical schools (Carrothers, Gregory & Gallagher, 2000).

Dramatic and Literary Arts Shapiro and Hunt (2003) found that exposure to illness‐related theatrical performances increased medical students’ understanding of the disease experience and prompted greater empathy for patients. They noted that attending recommended plays was an experience in “enforced listening” to the voice of the patient (p. 924). Koponen, Pyörälä, and Isotalus (2014) took performance viewing a step further, requiring students to provide input and par­ ticipate in scenes after they watched actors perform. Direct participation with improvisational theatre has been used to teach complex communication skills, such as listening, maintaining emotional connections, and creating clear messages (Hoffmann‐Longtin, Rossing & Weinstein, 2018). This process provides an innovative and emotionally engaging method of training stu­ dents for nuanced, dynamic interactions while encouraging mindfulness, active listening, and responding thoughtfully (Shochet, King, Levine, Clever & Wright, 2013). The use of paid, professional improvisational actors (experts in emotional expression) to work with students has led some faculty to the conclusion that effective learning about communication skills lies in the unscripted process. While conversing with patients without some type of script can be unsettling to novice learners, its proponents believe that clinicians need principled guidelines and a toolbox, rather than a reductionistic checklist. Improvised clinical encounters with professional actors provide space for imagination and may boost needed courage to assist future physicians in directly addressing patients, even when they anticipate uncomfortable dis­ cussions (Bell et al., 2014). “Cinemeducation” describes the use of movies, television programs, or documentary outtakes to teach effective communication skills (Darbyshire & Baker, 2012). Baños and Bosch (2015) recommended films with a focus on “social and humanistic values” (p. 209). For example, following a viewing of Wit (a dramatic film chronicling a professor’s experience as she succumbs to cancer), medical students recognized a lack of empathy and poor listening skills exhibited by clinicians (Klemenc‐Ketis & Kersnik, 2011, p. 3). Wong, Saber, Ma, & Roberts (2009) used clips from network television’s House and Gray’s Anatomy to increase resident understanding of the Kalamazoo evidence‐based model of doctor‐patient communication.

Narrative Medicine Instruction in Narrative Medicine has also been implemented at many medical schools. Professor and physician Rita Charon, widely noted as the founder of Narrative Medicine, noted that “the effective practice of medicine requires narrative competence, that is, the



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ability to acknowledge, absorb, interpret, and act on the stories and plights of others” (2001, p. 1897). Narrative Medicine seeks to enhance the listening and observation skills of medical students by emphasizing close reading and critical analysis of text. There are obvious parallels between Charon’s description and the definition of listening as “sensing, interpreting, evaluating, and responding” (Steil, Barker & Watson, 1983, p. 22). Proponents of Narrative Medicine claim the practice helps students develop empathic listening skills, including elevated attention to metaphor, figurative language, tone, and mood (Charon & Marcus, 2016), and that it builds concentration, which is transferrable to attentive listening abilities (Vannatta & Vannatta, 2013). A key concept in Narrative Medicine is narrative humility, or the recognition that patients’ stories are dynamic entities, shaped by socio‐economic forces that enable the telling of certain stories while silencing others. This perspective compels students to discern and respect mul­ tiple perspectives and acknowledge the hierarchical imbalance of the clinical relationship, and brings awareness of behavioral and existential dimensions like social and racial determinants of health. Narrative educators often use writing exercises that prompt physicians‐in‐training to make an empathic shift in perspective (DasGupta & Charon, 2004), demonstrating that liter­ ature‐based interventions exert a significant influence on students’ self‐reported empathy (Devlin et al., 2015).

Conclusion In writing this chapter, we are led to the same conclusion as other scholars: physician listening abilities are under‐researched and under‐evaluated and yet an essential skillset that should be taught during medical school. The paucity of scholarship extends even to training in p ­ sychiatric listening (Brenner, 2017). Unfortunately, few medical scholar‐practitioners appear committed to bring positive change in listening education practices; McGill Medical School faculty being a notable exception (Jagosh et al., 2011; Boudreau, Cassell, & Fuks, 2009). Because listening skills are rarely highlighted in medical school curricula, it is unclear what method(s) may best promote knowledge of empathic responses. We have reviewed a variety of methods used to teach empathic response, ranging from advanced technology (e.g. VPs) and subject matter experts to motivational interviewing, EI, and drama and media. We are struck by the fact that almost no medical school faculty have borrowed from the established listening research or communication scholarship more generally. For example, the literature we reviewed often portrayed empathy education as “soft‐skills” training that is a necessary counterpart to the dominant curriculum reflecting the biomed­ ical paradigm. Although there is some controversy as to the extent of the evidence, research has established that levels of empathy tend to ebb during medical school (Neumann, et al., 2011), fueled by vocational burnout, and leading to a tendency to depersonalize patients. Yet, medical faculty‐scholars, as seen in this chapter, believe that attitudes and skills can be enhanced over the course of professional training and in the practice years (Haslam, 2008). Moreover, when asked what they think should be taught in medical school coursework, patients consistently mention listening skills (Boudreau, Jagosh, Slee, Macdonald, & Steinert, 2008; Jagosh et al., 2011). The process by which medical faculty educate future physicians could be meaningfully augmented by working with communication scholars. For example, The Integrative Listening Process Model echoes the components of the empathic response process cited in the clinical literature. The five elements – Receive, Comprehend, Interpret, Evaluate, and Respond – are present in every listening encounter. This type of listening model could provide medical stu­ dents with a framework for understanding how and why they listen the way they do, and then improve upon their skills (Thompson, Leintz, Nevers & Witkowski, 2004).

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Finally, we appreciate that the title of this chapter is a misnomer. Learning about listening in medical school is an indirect process at best. Seldom does curricula incorporate training specific to developing effective listening skills and attitudes. Faculty instead turn to educational designs targeting the cultivation of basic empathy and longstanding widely respected practices in Balint type support groups (Lichtenstein, Antoun, Rule, Knowlton & Sternlieb, 2018).1 The communication studies discipline has much to offer medical education, particularly in the area of listening instruction. Effective empathic listening demonstrates to patients and their families that their concerns are shared and that true caring is present.

References Agius, S., Brown, J., Stratta, E., Hayden, J., & Baker, P. (2017). How do newly‐qualified doctors ­perceive empathy in medical training and practice? Journal of Contemporary Medical Education, 5, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.5455/jcme.20170530064220 Alvin, M. D. (2016). The USMLE step 2 CS: Time for a change. Medical Teacher, 38, 854–856. https:// doi.org/10.3109/0142159x.2016.1147539 Baños, J.‐E., & Bosch, F. (2015). Using feature films as a teaching tool in medical schools. Educación Médica, 16, 206–211. https://doi:10.1016/j.edumed.2015.09.001 Baumal, R., & Benbassat, J. (2008). Current trends in the educational approach for teaching interviewing skills to medical students. Israel Medical Association Journal, 10, 552–555. Bell, S. K., Pascucci, R., Fancy, K., Coleman, K., Zurakowski, D., & Meyer, E. C. (2014). The educational value of improvisational actors to teach communication and relational skills: Perspectives of inter­ professional learners, faculty, and actors. Patient Education and Counseling, 96, 381–388. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.pec.2014.07.001 Boudreau, J.D, Cassell, E., & Fuks, A. (2009). Preparing medical students to become attentive listeners. Medical teacher, 31, 22–29. Boudreau, J. D., Jagosh, J., Slee, R., Macdonald, M. E., & Steinert, Y. (2008). Patients’ perspectives on physicians’ roles: Implications for curricular reform. Academic Medicine, 83, 744–753. https://doi. org/10.1097/ACM.0b013e31817eb4c0 Brenner, A. M. (2017). Listening: An underlying competency in psychiatry education. Academic Psychiatry, 41, 385–390. https://doi:10.1007/s40596‐016‐0641‐9 Burdick, W. P., Boulet, J. R., & LeBlanc, K. E. (2018). Can we increase the value and decrease the cost of clinical skills assessment? Academic Medicine, 93, 690–692. https://doi.org/10.1097/acm. 0000000000001867 Carrothers, R. M., Gregory Jr, S. W., & Gallagher, T. J. (2000). Measuring emotional intelligence of medical school applicants. Academic Medicine, 75, 456–463. https://doi.org/10.1097/00001888 ‐200005000‐00016 Charon, R. (2001). Narrative medicine: A model for empathy, reflection, profession, and trust. JAMA, 286, 1897–1902. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.286.15.1897 Charon, R., & Marcus, E. R. (2016). The principles and practice of narrative medicine. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Chen, J. G., Zou, B., & Shuster, J. (2017). Relationship between patient satisfaction and physician char­ acteristics. Journal of Patient Experience, 4, 177–184. https://doi.org/10.1177/2374373517714453

In the 1950s, Michael Balint, a psychoanalyst, and Enid Balint, a social worker, established a school with the goal of educating physicians about empathy in the patient‐doctor relationship. Their work became an international movement, which today is reflected in the curricula of many medical schools and resi­ dency programs. The Balint group model helps students recognize that they are not alone in having challenging interactions with patients. Students receive support as they improve their communication skills in these and other difficult situations. Space constraints prevent a full discussion of the Balint approach here. For additional information on this movement, please visit one of the following websites: The UK Balint Society, https://balint.co.uk; The American Balint Society, http://americanbalintsociety. org; and The International Balint Federation, https://www.balintinternational.com.

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PART IV

Contexts and Applications

This part showcases six chapters that cover specialized contexts for the study of listening. The first two chapters present listening as a mechanism for successful mindful interpersonal listening and deception detection, respectively, each drawing heavily from interpersonal communication, psychology, and philosophy. A third chapter explores how listening is conceptualized in mediated spaces and the role of technology in shaping listening preferences and behavior. The next three chapters investigate how listening is used to improve interactions in the legal, healthcare, and participatory democracy contexts. In general, this section highlights the power of listening to make our individual and collective lives better.

The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Mindful Interpersonal Listening Susanne M. Jones and Amy C. Joyer

Decades of research in the social sciences have focused on the “self” as the explanatory ­mechanism for cognition, emotion, and behavior; yet Western researchers still lack a clear explanatory mechanism of how we communicate shared meaning: How do we “share” ­emotional experiences, and how can we account for the seemingly “magical” communicative phenomenon of making sense to one another? What exactly is dyadic communication? This perspective began to change in the early 1990s when a team of researchers ventured to Tibet to examine connections between contemplative practices and its neurophysiological and psychological consequences (see Houshmand, Harrington, Saron, & Davidson, 2001). In the decades that followed, social psychologists continued to move away from Cartesian dualism toward approaches that stress a nondual, metacognitive perspective as the primary explanatory mechanism for cognitive and affective processes (Harrington, 2001). In this chapter, we examine social connectedness in interpersonal communication by focusing on the conceptual space of active‐empathic listening. Disclosers appreciate listeners who are active and empathic (Bodie, Vickery, Cannava, & Jones, 2015; Jones, Bodie, & Hughes, 2016), but what are the cognitive and metacognitive mechanisms through which active‐empathic listening can be accomplished? We argue that mindfulness is a metacognitive mechanism through which p ­ eople can actively and empathically listen to others and cultivate a prosocial orientation to others, a sense of social connectedness, and perhaps also increased health and well‐being.

Mindful Listening By qualifying it with the two functional characteristics of activity and empathy, listening gains in theoretical scope and leads to the question: What does it mean for listeners to be active and empathic? Presumably, this kind of listening involves more than backchanneling (e.g., head nods) and maintaining eye contact, as most people commonly assume. Indeed, in a series of studies, Bodie, St. Cyr, Pence, Rold, and Honeycutt (2012) examined the specific behavioral cues that people associate most frequently with competent listening. While maintaining eye contact was in the top five listening cues, the four other behaviors indicated some form of conversational engagement beyond simple nonverbal responding: responding with topic‐relevant questions; elaborating on topics; asking questions; and offering views, perspectives, and The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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personal experiences. These behaviors show that listening is active, requiring cognitive a­ lertness to the present conversation, as well as empathic, requiring the listener to capture, interpret, and reference the emotional experiences of the discloser in talk. Active‐empathic listening is a three‐stage activity, involving sensing, processing, and responding (Bodie, 2011; Bodie, Gearhart, Denham, & Vickery, 2013; Gearhart & Bodie, 2011). Sensing is perhaps most directly associated with empathy and captures listener ­awareness of the discloser’s thoughts and feelings (e.g., “I understand how others feel”). The second stage involves active processing; competent listeners use verbal cues to assure the discloser that information is processed and retained (e.g., “I assure others that I will remember what they say”). Lastly, responding involves attention; competent listeners use behavioral cues that signal to the discloser that listeners are cognitively present and engaged (e.g., “I assure others that I  am receptive to their ideas”). This conceptualization of listening serves as the theoretical basis for the model of mindful listening we develop in this chapter. We begin by defining mindfulness and briefly summarize empirical evidence that documents its impact on our well‐being. We pay particular attention to research on the contributions of mindfulness to interpersonal relationships. We then present a theoretical model of mindfulness and active‐empathic listening that is grounded in Garland’s (see, Garland, Farb, Goldin, & Fredrickson, 2015a, 2015b; Garland, Hanley, Farb, & Froeliger, 2013; Garland et al., 2016; Garland et al., 2018) Mindfulness‐to‐Meaning Theory (MMT).

Mindfulness Our internal narrative stream is rarely in sync with the things we do at any given time (e.g., showering, fixing dinner, driving). The purpose of mindfulness is to focus attention and ­metacognitive awareness on present moment thought and action (Hanley, Warner, Dehili, Canto, & Garland, 2015). Researchers tend to either focus on the effects of stable mindfulness dispositions on outcomes like mental health or emotions or on the extent to which state mindfulness can change as a result of a contemplative regimen, such as Mindfulness‐based Stress Reduction (MBSR; see Kabat‐Zinn, 2003). The benefits of mindfulness include a host of psychological, somatic, and stress‐related illness advantages (for a review see Brown & Ryan, 2003; Greeson, Garland, & Black, 2014; Hölzel et al., 2011). Mindfulness enhances neural (Davidson et al., 2003), cognitive (Jha, Krompinger, & Baime, 2007), and affective (McCarney, Schulz, & Grey, 2012) functioning, and it has positive effects on relational satisfaction among couples (Barnes, Brown, Krusemark, Campbell, & Rogge, 2007; Carson, Carson, Gil, & Baucom, 2007). Research on mindfulness has two historical roots: (i) Eastern contemplative psychology (Harrington, 2001); and (ii) Western social psychology (Brown & Ryan, 2003; Langer, 1989). From both the contemplative and the psychological perspective, everyone possesses a modicum of mindfulness. Furthermore, from both perspectives, mindfulness means to let go of misconceptions, automatic thought and response patterns, as well as self‐imposed limitations in coping effectively with difficult emotions, thoughts, and events. Mindfulness consists of two processes: (a) becoming aware of attachments to things, thoughts, habits, and emotions; and (b) letting go of these attachments and viewing things from a different, more flexible perspective (Shapiro & Mariels, 2013). Two cognitive capabilities are crucial for these two processes: (a) orienting attention to the present moment; and (b) adopting a nonjudgmental, nonreactive response to one’s emotions (Shapiro, Carlson, Astin, & Freedman, 2006). Cultivating an intentional, nonjudgmental stance toward one’s own emotional experiences of the present moment is the most challenging aspect of becoming and/or being mindful because reacting to and judging emotions often happens automatically and simultaneously (Garland et  al., 2015b). Emotion regulation theory tells us that emotions emerge from



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cognitive appraisals (Gross & John, 2003; Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), which are ­interpretations of external stimuli and what these stimuli mean to us (Gross, 2014). For instance, sadness emerges from appraisals of loss, and anger emerges when we appraise events as potentially harmful to us and those we love. The key to appraisal is that the same event can be appraised differently by different people. The definition of emotion as an effect of appraisals causes a conceptual contradiction for mindfulness: Even though mindfulness practice teaches us not to judge our emotional experiences, the very experience of an emotion requires some form of judgment in the form of appraisals. Mindfulness researchers resolve this contradiction by inserting a cognitive factor into the appraisal process: decentering is the ability to attend to one’s own conscious processes as part of the appraisal process (Fresco et al., 2007). Thus, a more mindful person might merely note emotions, and in the context of personal goals, wants, and needs, refrain from judging these emotions negatively or critically. To cultivate mindfulness is to cultivate the ability to decenter and focus. Mindfulness is frequently assessed with the well‐validated Five‐Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ; Baer, Smith, Hopkins, Krietemeyer, & Toney, 2006; for a review, see Danielson & Jones, 2017). The first mindfulness facet is observing, which includes indicators such as attending to internal and external stimuli. Describing, the second attribute, involves a person’s ability to label and express these experiences. Acting with awareness includes p ­ resent‐centered attending to one’s actions in real time and is contrasted with ­acting on autopilot. Nonjudging inner experiences features taking a nonevaluative stance toward one’s thoughts and feelings. The last attribute, nonreacting to inner experiences, refers to a person’s tendency to let thoughts and feelings come and go without getting attached to them or carried away.

Interpersonal Mindfulness

Mindfulness tends to be viewed as an intrapersonal phenomenon that bestows positive effects on individual functioning. Because interpersonal relationships are also intrinsically associated with our psychological and physiological well‐being (Holt‐Lunstad, Smith, Baker, Harris, & Stephenson, 2015; Holt‐Lunstad, Smith, & Layton, 2010), researchers have begun to examine connections between mindfulness and interpersonal functioning. Although in its early stages, this work suggests that mindfulness is positively associated with relational satisfaction and might also promote healthy attachment mechanisms (K. C. Jones, Welton, Oliver, & Thoburn, 2011; Wachs & Cordova, 2007). Mindfulness seems to play a particularly beneficial role when couples discuss emotionally stressful topics (i.e., troubles talk). For example, Laurent, Hertz, Nelson, and Laurent (2016) showed that state mindfulness (rather than dispositional mindfulness) increased positive affect among couples after they discussed a stressful topic. Specifically, adopting an open, nonjudgmental stance toward the conversation and the partner was positively associated with positive affect, which in turn led to increased well‐being. Actor‐partner studies (i.e., studies that assess the effects a person has on the partner) show that when actors are mindful and approach the conversation and the partner with an open, nonjudging, curious mind, partners experience lower reactivity, anger, and hostility levels (Barnes et  al., 2007; Wachs & Cordova, 2007). Other studies suggest that mindful women tend to have positive effects on men’s emotional experiences during conflict (Barnes et al., 2007). Most of the work on mindfulness and its impact on relational functioning is based on self‐ report data. In addition, theories that explain how mindfulness influences interpersonal processes are still in their infancy. Currently, theoretical frameworks for mindful relational functioning include attachment theory (K. C. Jones et  al., 2011) and the comprehensive relational model (CRM; Karremans, Schellekens, & Kappen, 2017; Kappen, Karremans, Burk, & Buyukcan‐Tetik, 2018). The CRM is particularly intriguing. Although it does not examine dyadic symbolic exchange, it proposes that mindfulness cultivates cognitive processes,

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including attentional focus, control, and emotion‐regulation. The model might thus offer a broad framework for mindful relational communication.

Self‐Other Connecting in Interpersonal Mindfulness

Presumably, self‐other connecting should happen actively and empathically when two people talk. But how do the discloser and the listener “connect” with one another? How can we conceptualize this so‐called “connection”? We view this connection as grounded in cognitive prosocial orientations, namely compassion and empathy (Birnie, Speca, & Carlson, 2010; Crocker & Canevello, 2008; S. M. Jones et al., 2016; Stewart, Ahrens, & Gunthert, 2018; Trent, Park, Bercovitz, & Chapman, 2016; Wachs & Cordova, 2007; Youngvorst & Jones, 2017). Kristeller and Johnson (2005) proposed a two‐step process whereby mindfulness cultivates prosocial orientations: Mindfulness allows people to: (a) disengage from self‐centered emotional experiences by becoming mindful; and (b) shift toward an other‐centered cognitive frame that stresses common humanity, an understanding of human frailties, and how people can potentially grow from adverse situations. This process corresponds with research on self‐ compassion (Neff & Pommier, 2013). Recent evidence also suggests that both compassion and empathy aim to help a suffering person. Empathy activates neurophysiological pathways that are similar to the experience of physical pain (Klimecki, Leiberg, Ricard, & Singer, 2014). To be empathic means to ­vicariously feel what the other person is feeling. Thus, it can include the experience of ­negative emotions. Compassion, on the other hand, activates brain regions associated with nurturing, positive emotions of warmth, and benevolence that generate a sense of social connectedness (Kok et  al., 2013; Kok & Fredrickson, 2010). These positive emotions, in turn, broaden one’s attentional scope and the ability to access a wider range of thoughts and actions (Fredrickson & Branigan, 2005). These neurological differences suggest that compassion is not only directed toward others, but also includes benevolent feelings toward oneself (Neff & Pommier, 2013). Central to self‐compassion is a sense of common humanity, which “involves recognizing that all humans are imperfect, that all people fail and make mistakes” (Neff & Pommier, 2013, p. 161); two additional components include self‐kindness (i.e., the ability to be understanding toward oneself), and mindfulness, which “involves being aware of present moment experience in a clear and balanced manner so that one neither dislikes nor ruminates on disliked aspects of oneself or one’s life” (p. 161). Self‐compassion might thus be a particularly important prosocial resource for listeners, because it assists them in approaching the partner’s difficult emotions experienced and expressed during troubles talk with a positive, curious, and accepting stance. Several studies have found that self‐compassion is associated with self‐regulatory mechanisms (e.g., accepting criticism) while at the same time experiencing lower negative emotions (Leary, Tate, Adams, Batts Allen, & Hancock, 2007; Study 4), as well as depression and proactive approaches toward one’s health (Johnson & O’Brien, 2013; Terry, Leary, & Mehta, 2013).

Mindful Parenting

The emerging evidence for the importance of mindfulness in parenting as a specific case of interpersonal mindfulness deserves brief mention. Mindful parenting is defined as paying attention to one’s child in a particular way, namely by being intentionally aware and present, as well as nonreactive and nonjudgmental (de Bruin et al., 2014). Several studies show that this parenting style has beneficial effects for both parents and children who suffer from developmental difficulties and/or anxiety (Singh et  al., 2014). Duncan and colleagues (2009) recently developed a theoretical model of mindful parenting, which also includes a self‐report measure, the Interpersonal Mindfulness in Parenting (IM‐P) scale. This scale includes five



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factors, which are quite commensurate with the five facets of mindfulness we discussed earlier. Research on mindful parenting is relatively new. Thus far, we know that the IM‐P tends to be negatively correlated with depression and parental over‐reactivity and that it generates more positive parent‐child relationships (Coatsworth, Duncan, Greenberg, & Nix, 2010; de Bruin et al., 2014).

A Process Model of Active‐Empathic Listening Good listening is essential in close relationships, including parenting, because listening to a partner is necessary to enhance understanding and to capture the gravity and meaning of emotional experiences (Kuhn, Bradbury, Nussbeck, & Bodenmann, 2018). Not surprisingly, active‐empathic listeners are viewed as more responsive (Cahn & Frey, 1992) and supportive (Collins & Feeney, 2000). Characteristics of a skilled communicator include facets that correspond to the definition of active‐empathic listening detailed earlier: noticing verbal and nonverbal cues (sensing), expressing feelings and emotions appropriately (responding), being able to explain thoughts and intentions clearly (processing), and having the cognitive awareness to know what is appropriate during an interaction (processing/responding; Greene & Burleson, 2003). Crucial elements of successful interactions include intentional and purposeful monitoring of self‐behavior to properly interpret the responses of others and the ability to adjust or adapt to situations in situ (Hargie, 2011). While we appreciate skilled listeners, we often do not listen “well.” There are many barriers to effective listening (e.g., mind wandering, judgments; DeVito, 2002; Hargie, 2011), which often become habits (i.e., automatic response patterns to external circumstances). Mindfulness assists in effective listening by abolishing listening barriers. Mindful listening requires focusing on the present moment, including sensations as they arise, taking note of the conversation and the discloser, and refraining from judging whether the information is good or bad. As Brown, Ryan, and Creswell (2007, p. 212) explained, this cognitive focus occurs because being mindful: involves a receptive state of mind, wherein attention is kept to a bare registering of the facts observed…the basic capacities for awareness and attention permit the individual to be present to reality…rather than react to it or habitually process it.

The claim that mindfulness can enhance listening seems obvious. However, given its focus on the person, how can mindfulness enhance listening, which is by definition a dyadic activity?

Mindfulness to Meaning Consider, for instance, a supportive conversation that might lead the listener to become ­anxious, because the listener wants to help the distressed friend or family member, yet lacks words and/or information to help. Being at a loss of supportive words may further exacerbate our anxieties and may ultimately also have negative relational consequences (e.g., not feeling supported). We propose mindfulness‐to‐meaning theory (MMT) by Garland and colleagues (Garland, et  al., 2015a, 2015b; Garland, et  al., 2016; Garland, Hanley, Goldin, & Gross, 2017) as a conceptual framework for mindful listening. MMT centers on emotion regulation in stressful situations yet can also help us understand how active‐empathic listening occurs. MMT specifies mindfulness mechanisms that assist in cognitive processing of information by proposing a model that comprises five ordered steps: 1. attentional focus facilitates, 2. decentering from stressful encounters, which leads to

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3. broadened awareness of novel perspectives and information. This novel information then leads to 4. cognitive reappraisal of the self, which 5. results in short‐term hedonic benefits (e.g., positive emotional experiences), as well as long‐term eudaimonic benefits (e.g., improved listening, satisfied relationships, increased compassion for self and others) (Garland et al., 2015b). In 2017, Garland et al. generated comprehensive support for the MMT with data from a 12‐month longitudinal study of participants with social anxiety disorder who completed an MBSR regimen. These data provided support for the temporal process of attentional control, decentering, broadened awareness, and reappraisal. Increases in reappraisals also led to increased positive affect one year after the regimen. Notably, the MMT does not specify structured contemplative practice as the primary mechanism that promotes positive outcomes. Instead, the theory emphasizes mechanisms implicated in state or trait ­mindfulness, specifically attentional control and decentering. Any kind of exercise regimen capable of stimulating these mindfulness mechanisms should be beneficial in attaining attentional focus and decentering one’s emotions or automatic patterns of behavior (Garland et al., 2017).

Mindful Active‐Empathic Listening As noted earlier, attentional focus, which is the deliberate focus on an object or idea, is one of the two primary mechanisms of mindfulness. If active‐empathic listening consists of three stages, namely sensing, processing, and responding, then attentional focus becomes an important mechanism for effectively practicing these three stages. Sensing information using attentional focus means to refocus attention on the felt experiences of the narrative of the discloser rather than one’s own internal narrative which serves as a barrier. Listening research has certainly documented the importance of paying attention (Pasupathi & Rich, 2005). Similarly, processing information and responding are influenced by attentional focus, which is reflected in specific responses that are provided by the listener. As reviewed earlier, disclosers prefer a listener who engages in the conversation with topic‐relevant comments; the listener can only generate these by attending to the discloser’s narrative. An important question is how attentional focus happens. The MMT proposes that decentering is a key process by which attention is disengaged from habitual cognitive schemas and “broadened into a state of metacognitive awareness, a state in which one monitors the object of cognition as well as the meta‐level of awareness…or the quality of one’s awareness” (Garland et al., 2017, p. 3). Through the process of decentering, mindful listeners become aware of their own listening habits and let go of these habits in a nonjudgmental, nonreactive way. Although the implications of decentering listening habits have not yet been tested in the ­context of active‐empathic listening, research from interpersonal mindfulness, as well as the MMT, resonates with our claim that decentering plays a crucial role in the listening process. For instance, Laurent et al. (2016) found that decentering mitigated partner withdrawal and negative reactivity during conflict conversations. Attentional focus allowed partners to not only regulate their own emotional responses, but also to “unstick” emotional responses while staying engaged with the partner. Staying engaged with the partner leads to the second important component of mindfulness that should directly influence the three steps of active‐empathic listening. The ability to approach individuals with an open, curious mind should directly influence the extent to which listeners experience compassion and develop an other‐oriented



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focus. That is, increased levels of mindfulness should lead to increased levels of adopting an other‐oriented focus during listening. The MMT strikes us as an important theoretical framework that could help us understand how active‐empathic listening can be accomplished. The two key components of attentional focus and decentering, as well as self‐other connections through self/compassion are integral parts of mindful active‐empathic listening. We envision that the three active‐empathic listening steps of sensing, processing, and responding to information are directly impacted by these two key mindfulness components. The claims we make about the integration of MMT and active‐ empathic listening, as well as the associations between attentional focus, decentering, and self‐other orientation have not yet been tested.

Conclusion It is high time for some profound wisdom from the Mad Hatter  –  and lots of crazy magic, because “You know what the issue is with this world? Everyone wants a magical solution to their problems, and everyone refuses to believe in magic” (Carroll, 1865/2005). The problem concerns the self: Decades of Western scientific focus on the self as the explanatory mechanism has not brought us any closer to understanding what connects us in talk, how we “share” emotional experiences, and how we can account for seemingly “magical” communicative phenomena, such as those experienced by cancer patients who experience improved quality of life by participating in cancer support groups (Spiegel et al., 2007). Prior to Buddhist or positive psychology, we had been nowhere near understanding the conceptual space of dyadic communication, which is concerned with the study of how shared symbolic information is understood. In this chapter we introduced mindfulness as a crucial explanatory mechanism for active‐ empathic listening. As a metacognitive mechanism, mindfulness allows us to sharpen our listening skills, and to hone our ability to be present and aware of the moment and of the other. The act of active‐empathic listening requires sensing, processing, and responding. Incorporating the two primary mechanisms of mindfulness, namely present‐moment attending and nonjudging, could lead to improved self‐other connections, and thus, improved and more satisfying listening. Incorporating mindfulness into the listening process also means that the study of listening can profit from a nondualist approach that integrates mind and body. Mindfulness has thus far been shown to possess many benefits; we reviewed research for ­parent‐child relationships, where developmental differences and transitions can sometimes hinder effective communication and feelings of support. The sensitive developmental period of adolescence is especially fraught with challenges. Adolescents often struggle with feelings of not being heard and contend with psychobiological shifts in mood which include elevated rates of depression and anxiety and lower overall positive moods (Geurtzen, Scholte, Engels, Tak, & van Zundert, 2015; Weinstein, Mermelstein, Hankin, Hedeker, & Flay, 2007). While mindful parenting research is still relatively new, initial studies suggest that “mindful ­parenting may improve mother‐adolescent communication by reducing parental negative reactions to information, adolescent perceptions of over‐control, and by improving the affective quality of the parent‐adolescent relationship” (Lippold, Duncan, Coatsworth, Nix, & Greenberg, 2015, p. 1163), as well as lower adolescent internalization of problems (Geurtzen et  al., 2015). Compared to early childhood, when it is easier to monitor the child, adolescents typically desire more autonomy, and most of the information gained by a parent may be through listening (Lippold et al., 2015). Parental responses that are perceived as supportive have been associated with increased parent‐child communication (Lippold et al., 2015; Tilton‐Weaver, Marshall, Darling, 2014). Part of this parent‐child communication includes mindful active‐ empathic listening.

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Listening, Lying, and Deceit Timothy R. Levine

Lying and deception create a conundrum for listeners. On one hand, deception detection involves careful and critical listening. At the same time, it requires attitudes and attributes often viewed as antithetical to effective, supportive listening (e.g., wariness, skepticism, suspicion). Clearly, understanding deception is relevant to understanding listening and vice versa. This chapter explores the complex interplay between listening and deception from the perceptive of deception theory and research. First, I begin by defining deception. Several difficulties in defining deception are addressed. Next, I describe key elements of deception theory and research, including deception cues, communication content, truth‐bias, and deception ­detection. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the interplay between deception and listening, and their effect on deception detection.

Defining Deception A typical definition of human‐to‐human deception involves someone (or some group) knowingly or intentionally misleading another person (or larger audience). Although this definition may seem straightforward, it glosses over some difficult questions. Do we need to distinguish deceptive attempts from successful deception? That is, are lies that fool no one still deception? How about self‐deception? If I genuinely believe the falsehood I speak, is it still a lie? For that matter, do we need to distinguish lies from deception or can the words be used interchangeably? The words lie and deception are often used interchangeably, but there is a difference that sometimes matters. If we want to split semantic hairs, a lie is a subtype of deception. All lies are deception, or at least attempts at deception, but there are many ways to deceive other than outright lying. Lying refers to communication with content that is known by the sender to be false that is communicated for the purpose of misleading the audience. Intentional falsehoods can be of an innocuous and inconsequential sort serving the purpose of politeness (little white lies), or they can be about important topics with harmful consequences for those who are deceived. What makes a lie a lie is the act of knowingly conveying false information in order to mislead others.

The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

342 Levine McCornack (1992, 1997, McCornack, Morrison, Paik, Wiser, & Zhu, 2014) has observed that most deceptive discourse is accomplished in ways other than the telling of outright falsehoods, which he calls bald‐faced lies. He argues that deception by omission is the most common form of deception (McCornack et al., 2014). A message can be accurate in the sense that what is said is literally true, but one or more critical and relevant detail(s) can be left out creating an impression in the audience that is misleading. That is, deception can involve hiding the truth in addition to or rather than conveying false information. Deceptively hiding or distorting the truth also can be accomplished with vague and opaque language. Things can be said that are open to multiple (and incorrect) interpretations. Conversations can be shifted away from sensitive topics, or answers to questions can be unresponsive and irrelevant to the question asked. Deception can even be accomplished with completely truthful and relevant statements if a communicator knows that an audience might think the opposite. For example, a true statement might be said sarcastically producing deception. McCornack notes that the various ways people deceive others seldom present as pure and distinct types of deception or fall within neat mutually exclusive categories. Instead, apart from simple omissions which vary in how much is omitted, deceptive messages usually occur as blends of approaches varying along several linguistic dimensions. Levine (2020) argued that four criteria must be met in order to confidently label a message as deceptive. First, the message that is communicated must depart from the truth. Deception researchers often speak of “ground truth” which refers to the complete and objective truth of some matter. Often, ground truth cannot be known for certain. Nevertheless, to infer that a message counts as deception, we need to have reason to believe that it departs from ground truth in some meaningful way. Ideally, of course, we would know not only that a message is departing from the truth, but also what the truth is that is being hidden. In any case, deceptive messages have false or misleading content or implication. Second, audience impact needs to be considered. Would a reasonable member of the language community who was unaware of ground truth be misled by the message? This criterion is intended to rule out transparently false statements and conventionally understood falsehoods. One example is sarcasm. If I make a false statement but say it sarcastically, then what is meant is not false. Listeners can be expected to understand what was meant. Or if you ask me in passing “What’s up?” and I answer “Nothing much,” it should be understood that the question–answer sequence is conventional and habitual and not to be taken literally. Finally, if I say something that is obviously absurd like “the earth has several dozen moons,” or “I wear size 78 shoes,” these would not be expected to fool anyone. Third, we need to consider sender knowledge, competence, and intent. Does the speaker know, or should they know, that the message will be misleading? Here we want to rule out honest mistakes and delusions. Not long ago I passed an apparently homeless man on a street in a large city. He was highly agitated and was screaming and swatting at what seemed to be a swarm of invisible insects. A reasonable interpretation of his actions was that he was mentally ill and delusional. His behavior was not a deceptive attempt to convince passersby of the existence of the imaginary swarm. Finally, message function is considered. Normally, deceptive communication does not occur randomly. Instead, it is response to a mismatch between a person’s communication goals and the reality of a situation (Levine, Kim & Hamel, 2010; McCornack et  al., 2014). That is, people attempt to deceive others when the truth is a problem. When communication goals can be achieved through honest communication, people are invariably honest (Levine et  al., 2010). Thus, when inferring that a message is deceptive, we should consider why the ground truth was problematic for the deceiver and how the deceptive message functioned to overcome the obstacle created by the truth. Putting these four criteria together, we can infer deception when the content of the message is false or misleading, when it is likely fool the audience, when the sender knows (or should



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know) that it is false or misleading, and where the misleading nature of the communication is functional in the sense that it overcomes some problematic truth for the sender. Of course, many times we lack the information to meet all four criteria. In such cases, we might reasonably suspect deception, but we can’t be sure. If we can confidently rule out any of the four criteria, then we can rule out deception. One exception is worth noting. These criteria, especially the third and fourth, do not apply to pathological lying. Pathological lying is exceptionally unusual (Levine, Ali, Dean, Abdulla & Garcia‐Ruano, 2016). But, pathological liars are notably different from non‐pathological liars. There are at least two criteria that are critical in identifying a pathological liar (Ford, 1996). First, pathological liars lie even when honesty would be advantageous (Ford, 1996). As noted previously, most people are honest when the truth is sufficient for goal attainment and only lie to avoid problematic truths. That is, people lie only when there is a need for deception, and the point of the deception is not to be deceptive per se, but as a way around some problem posed by the truth. For pathological liars, lying is more random. They do not need a reason to lie, they lie with little regard for the consequences of getting caught, and they lie even when honesty seems to be in their own best interests (Ford, 1996). Second, for pathological liars, seemingly random lying is an ongoing pattern of behavior. Pathological liars lie frequently and without apparent motive. For these reasons, interacting with a pathological liar is disorienting and an unpleasant experience.

Cues Perhaps there is no more central idea in the social science of human‐to‐human deception than the idea of a deception cue. Deception cues refer to specific behaviors linked with deception, perceptions of deception, or beliefs about deception (Levine, 2018, 2020). Think of cues as “tells” that are indicative of lying. They can be nonverbal behaviors like gaze aversion, a brief smile, vocal pitch, or fidgeting. They can be linguistic elements such as the number of first person pronouns or words related to space and time. Research has extensively investigated folk deception cues, cues associated with judgments of deception, and cue utility. Each of these is discussed in turn.

Folk Deception Cues Some of the most intriguing findings involve folk beliefs about deception. People believe that liars give off cues that give away their lies, and these folk beliefs about deception cues are remarkably constant across languages, cultures, and regions of the world. Bond and The Global Deception Research Team (2006) asked 40 participants from 58 different countries how they could tell if someone was lying. Nearly two‐thirds (64%) of people surveyed mentioned gaze aversion. Gaze aversion was the most frequent response in 51 of 58 countries (88%), and it was mentioned by no fewer than 8 of the 40 respondents from each of the 58 countries. The next most frequent response was that liars act nervous, listed by 28% of the respondents. Clearly, people from around the world hold folk beliefs about deception cues. These folk beliefs emphasize nonverbal behaviors, especially but not exclusively related to eye behavior.

Cues Associated with Judgments of Deception Another line of research has examined cues associated with judgments of deception. Whereas folk beliefs are typically studied with survey methods, research on the cues linked to judgments of deception uses behavioral observation. This type of research involves two sets of participants,

344 Levine senders who either lie or tell the truth and judges (receivers) who observe the senders. The sender behaviors are “coded” for various deception cues. Independent of the coding, judges are asked whether they think each sender is honest or lying. The data are then analyzed looking for the statistical associations between the cues enacted by the senders and the truth‐lie assessments of the judges (Hartwig & Bond, 2011). Hartwig and Bond (2011) conducted a meta‐analysis of cues associated with judgments of deception. Their findings suggest that cues and impressions linked with deception include (in order of strongest effects first): people rated as less competent are more likely judged to be dishonest; use of language with less space and time embedding (e.g., mentioning specific object locations or chronological details) is judged as less honest; more object fidgeting leads to judgments of dishonesty; and, more ambivalent, less spontaneous, and less plausible communication is evaluated as less than honest. Gaze aversion is statistically associated with judgments of deception, but its place of prominence is lost. Generally, there is considerable overlap between folk beliefs and judged‐as‐deceptive cues, but there are also notable differences. Folk beliefs most often involve specific or isolated behaviors (e.g., gaze aversion), while judgments of deception are based on broader impressions like competence, confidence, composure, and friendliness. When understanding what people tend to believe and when they perceive a message as deceptive, it is useful to distinguish between cues and demeanor. As previously noted, cues are specific behaviors. Demeanor, in contrast, refers to constellations of cues that tend to be given off together and are perceived as a package (Levine et al., 2011). Levine and his colleagues found that various cues and impressions related to judgments of deception are highly inter‐ correlated. They co‐occur. And, impressions of individual sender’s honesty or deceit are based on these inter‐correlated sets of behavior. By analogy, specific cues are like individual wolves. We can study large numbers of lone wolves and nevertheless miss out on core features of wolf behavior. This is because wolves are, by their nature, pack animals. It is only when we observe the pack that we understand wolves. Honest and deceptive demeanors are like wolf packs. Cues travel in packs (demeanor) and they function as a part of a pack. For readers familiar with systems thinking, demeanor is a system of behaviors that is more than the sum of its constituent parts. Nevertheless, most deception research examines specific cues which are treated as statistically independent from other cues (e.g., Hartwig & Bond, 2011).

Cue Utility A third line of research has examined cue utility. Research on cue utility looks at the extent to which cues actually distinguish truths from lies. Like the research on judged‐as‐deception cues, cue utility research is observational. It involves senders who either lie or tell the truth (or both). Sender behaviors are then coded for cues. The research then tests if the cues occur more frequently for honest or deceptive senders. The most cited meta‐analysis of cue utility is DePaulo et al. (2003). DePaulo’s research team found that most of the cues that have been studied do not differ between truths and lies. Most notably, gaze aversion seems to have no discernible utility as a deception cue. Honest senders and liars have about the same amount of eye contact. For the cues with statistical utility, the effect sizes were generally weak and heterogeneous. Heterogeneous findings are those that vary across studies. Moreover, cue utility findings show a trend toward getting weaker the more they are researched (Bond, Levine & Hartwig, 2015). The bottom line is that cues and demeanor influence perceptions of honesty and deceit more than they are actually indicative of actual honesty and deceit. People believe that liars exhibit cues, people rely on cues and demeanors to form impressions and make judgments about honesty, but such impressions and judgments are highly fallible because cue utility is, at best, highly fallible (Levine, 2018, 2020).



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Despite the lack of empirical evidence for cue utility, many theories of deception nevertheless contend that cues are indirectly and probabilistically indicative of lying. Levine (2018, 2020) called such theories “Cue Theories.” All cue theories share a common logic: 1. Truth telling and lying are held to be psychologically different experiences. For example, lying may produce felt emotions like guilt, fear of detection, or glee at fooling someone (Ekman, 2009). Other cue theories focus in lying being more cognitively effortful than honest communication (e.g., Vrij, 2015). Yet another psychological difference is that liars may be more strategic than truth tellers (e.g., Buller & Burgoon, 1996). 2. These psychological states that differentiate lying and telling the truth are signaled ­behaviorally. For instance, guilt might lead to gaze aversion. Other felt emotions might be revealed in micro facial expressions (Ekman, 2009). Cognitive effort may lead to longer response latencies or increased speech errors. Liars who are being strategic might provide fewer verifiable details (Nahari, Vrij and Fisher, 2014). The logic of cue theories is evident in the works such as that of Paul Ekman (Ekman, 2009; Ekman & Friesen, 1969), Buller and Burgoon (1996), Vrij (2015), and Nahari, Vrij and Fisher (2014). Alternatives to cue theories include DePaulo’s (1992) self‐presentation approach, Levine’s (2014, 2020) Truth‐Default Theory, and McCornack et  al.’s (2014) Information Manipulation Theory.

Communication Content In the previous section, a distinction was drawn between cues and demeanor. Both cues and demeanor can be further distinguished from communication content. Cues are specific behaviors, and demeanor involves how a person presents themself. Content, in contrast, involves what is said (or written). When we are listening to someone, one of the things we are doing is paying attention to and processing the content of their communication. A useful example of the difference between cues and content is details. Details can refer to either a cue or content. As a deception cue, we can count the number of details in a statement. Statistically, on average, lies have fewer details than truths (DePaulo et al., 2003). When used as a cue, we suspect that less detailed communication is more likely to be deceptive. It does not matter what the details are, just how many details there are. When viewed as an issue of communication content, however, what matters is not the number of details, but what the details are. Are they plausible? Do they fit with what else is known? Here is an example based on a weekly routine with my friends and colleagues Kelly Morrison and Steve McCornack. Most Tuesdays nights after class we go out for Chinese food. Below are two statements which may or may not be truthful. 1. This past Tuesday I went out for dinner with my friends. 2. As has become our tradition this semester, Steve, Kelly and I went out to our new favorite Chinese restaurant again this past Tuesday after Kelly’s class. We took an Uber so we could drink and not need a designated driver. The beer and wine menu was extensive. The stuffed mushrooms were the table favorite. The steak flatbread was really good too. Afterward, I wrote a glowing five‐star review on Open Table. As you can see, the second message is longer and more detailed than the first. Judging on the cue “number of details,” we might judge the first message to be the one more likely to be deceptive. Considering content, however, the reader might come to the opposite opinion. Stuffed mushrooms and steak flatbread do not sound like menu options at a Chinese restaurant,

346 Levine and the Uber and Open Table references might not fit well either. The second half of the ­message sounds more like a special night out than a weekly routine. In this instance, I did go out to dinner this past Tuesday with Steve and Kelly to our usual Chinese place. Thus, the first message is true. The second message describes a dinner we had when we were all out of town at the same conference.

Truth‐Bias and the Truth‐Default Another of the most reliable findings in deception research is that people tend to be truth‐ biased. Truth‐bias is the tendency to believe others’ communication regardless of its actual honesty (McCornack & Parks, 1986; Levine, Park & McCornack, 1999). In deception detection experiments, participants (judges or receivers) observe (or interact with) senders who either lie or tell the truth. Judges are directly and explicitly asked if they think each sender (or each message) is truthful or a lie. Judges tend to be truth‐biased judging, on average, more than 50% of messages as honest (Levine et  al., 1999). While truth‐bias holds up across senders, judges, and media, it tends to be stronger when the communication is face‐to‐face (Bond & DePaulo, 2006), when the sender and judge are interacting (Bond & DePaulo, 2006), and when the sender and judge are relationally close (McCornack & Parks, 1986). Interestingly, and perhaps counterintuitively, truth‐bias tends to be unaffected by the ratio of truths and lies being judged (Levine, Clare, Green, Serota, & Park, 2014). That is, people tend to be approximately equally truth‐biased for both predominantly honest and predominantly deceptive communication and changing the proportion of truths and lies being judged does not alter truth‐bias. Truth‐bias findings reliably emerge even though researchers directly ask research participants to consider the possibility of deception and despite the participants knowing that they are in a deception detection experiment where their primary task is to detect deception. Clare and Levine (2019) show that if participants are not directly prompted to consider the possibility of deception, thoughts related to lies and deception usually do not come to mind. That is, people most often cognitively process others’ communication with truth and honesty as a mindless default. The truth‐default (Levine, 2014, 2020) refers to the passive acceptance of incoming communication content where thoughts related to deception and honesty do not come to mind unless prompted or triggered. Of course, one thing that can trigger suspicion is when researchers ask if a message might be a lie. More generally, Truth‐ Default Theory lists warnings from other people, observation of a dishonest demeanor, recognition of motive for deception, obvious logical inconsistencies in communication content, and recognized factual inaccuracies as categories of events that can trigger active consideration of the possibility that a message might be deception.

Deception Detection Accuracy Perhaps the most frequently researched topic in the social science of deception is the extent to which people can correctly distinguish honest from deceptive communication. The go‐to ­reference summarizing deception detection accuracy is Bond and DePaulo’s (2006) meta‐ analysis. More recent updates are provided by Levine (2014, 2015, 2020). Deception detection experiments that involve cue and demeanor‐based detection produce consistent results that are normally distributed around 54% accuracy (Bond & DePaulo, 2006). The 54% average is significantly greater than 50–50 chance with a moderate effect size of d = 0.4. Nevertheless, 54% is almost universally interpreted as showing that people are poor lie detectors. Further, the 54% average is remarkably robust and holds across various media



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affordances (e.g., audio only vs. audio‐visual); levels of sender motivation, sender planning, or spontaneity; judge age, sex, and occupation; and the extent of interactivity between sender and judge (Aamodt & Custer, 2006; Bond & DePaulo, 2006). The 54% is for percent correct truth‐lie discrimination. Because people are truth‐biased, accuracy for truths is typically higher than accuracy for lies. This is called the “veracity effect” (Levine et al., 1999). The average percent correct for just honest communication is 61% compared to 47% for correctly classified lies (Bond & DePaulo, 2006).

Improved Deception Detection Fortunately, passive observation of cues and demeanor are not the only way to detect deception. In fact, even though this is how deception detection is most often researched, this is not how everyday people go about lie detection. In a study with telling results, Park, Levine, McCornack, Morrison and Ferrara (2002) asked people to recall an instance in which they discovered that they had been lied to and asked them how they came to detect the deception. Only 2% of the narratives involved real‐time lie detection based solely on cues or demeanor. Instead, most lies were detected after the fact, and the vast majority were detected either based comparing what was said to some external evidence or when the deceptive sender subsequently admitted their deception. Thus, the 54% accuracy in lie detection experiments may not apply to how people detect deception in everyday life. The ways people most often detect deception are not available options in the experiments producing 54% accuracy. The 54% finding indicates that cues and demeanor‐based deception detection is poor, not that people are poor lies detectors more generally. Perhaps the best way to detect deception involves using the correspondence approach (Blair, Reimer, & Levine, 2018; Levine 2020). This lie detection approach involves assessing the correspondence between what is said (communication content) and other verifiable knowledge or information. The content of the sender’s communication is compared to what is already known or what can be subsequently after‐the‐fact, fact‐checked. If the content contradicts ­factual information, then the content is suspect. Of course, the other three criteria described at the beginning of the chapter need to be considered (i.e., deceptive impact on recipient, sender culpability, function served), but a start is the recognition that communication content is false or misleading. The correspondence approach can be especially useful when the receiver has relevant evidence prior to the deceptive communication and the receiver can interact with the sender. The strategic use of evidence approach (Hartwig, Granhag, Stromwall, & Kronkvist, 2006) involves asking a potentially deceptive sender questions in which the question‐asker has pre‐existing evidence. The existence of the evidence, however, is not initially disclosed to the interviewee. If an interviewee contradicts the known evidence, the evidence can be gradually revealed in subsequent questions. The interviewee is asked to explain the discrepancies between their communication and the evidence. The strategic use of evidence approach makes telling coherent lies extremely difficult and often makes the truth apparent. Even if hard evidence is unavailable, communication content is still valuable for deception detection provided that the content can be understood in context. Hopefully, most people are aware that statements taken out of context can be misunderstood. The flip side of this common knowledge is also true: Statements put in context are more likely to be understood. This seems to be true for deception detection. When judges have some background knowledge that better enables them to understand the content of communication, the judges are better able to assess plausibility, the likelihood of honesty, and the prospects of deceptiveness. In an early demonstration under the label situational familiarity, Levine and McCornack (2001) asked college students to lie or tell the truth about current controversial topics on their

348 Levine campus or at another out‐of‐state campus. Judges from the same university as the senders watched videotapes of the senders and made truth‐lie determinations. The judges were much more accurate in their assessments of statements about own‐school issues (69%) than about the opinion statements where they lacked context (48%). Blair, Levine and Shaw (2010) reported similar improvements in accuracy (from 57% to 75%) across several experiments when judges had context information. A particularly useful type of context knowledge in deception detection is information about sender motivation (Bond, Howard, Hutchison, & Masip, 2013). As noted earlier, lying is not a random act, and people only lie when the truth is a problem for them. This notion allows judges to project a motive on others’ communication (Levine, Kim & Blair, 2010). If we generally understand the types of situations that prompt lying, and we understand the situation in which a particular communication occurs, accuracy can be increased substantially (Bond et al., 2013; Levine, 2015, 2019). A final approach to improved lie detection involves persuading sender honesty (Levine, Clare, Blair et al., 2014; Levine 2020). Park et al. (2002) found that subsequent sender confessions were a common lie detection method. The sender confession approach might have improved efficacy if the target of the deception actively tries to convince the sender to tell the truth. Levine, Clare, Blair et al. (2014) tested professional interrogators’ ability to persuade honest confession and report that the approach was 85% effective.

Listening, Deception, and Deception Detection This chapter began with the claim that lying and deception create a conundrum for listening. People who are engaged in active listening are likely to be in a truth default state. The thought that communication might be deceptive often does not come to mind. This makes people ­vulnerable to deception. Lies and other types of misleading content are uncritically accepted as true. This means that deception is often successful, at least in the short term, and people are easily duped. Even though the truth‐default makes people vulnerable to deceit, this may not be such a bad thing. According to Truth‐Default Theory (Levine, 2014, 2020), accepting others’ communication enables efficient communication, while chronic vigilance for deception undercuts efficient communication, cooperation, and coordination. Further, most communication is honest, and most lies are told by a relatively few prolific liars (Serota & Levine, 2015; Serota, Levine & Boster, 2010). Thus, given the infrequency of harmful lies, the truth‐default works well most of the time and lets communicators focus on understanding the other person and fostering healthy social, personal, and professional relationships. Given that most lies are told by a few prolific liars and that lying only occurs in situations where there is a motive to lie, the need is to balance vigilance against understanding the risk of deception. That is, most of the time efficient and effective communication is well served by being accepting and trusting of our fellow communicators. But, sometimes, we need to be on guard for deceit. In such circumstances, accurate deception detection involves critical listening for deception. Listening for deception involves careful attention to communication content understood in context. Communication content is compared to what is known and what can be known. Mental notes are made to fact check content that can be checked for accuracy. Attention is paid to potential motives for deceit, the plausibility of content, and the logical consistency of the content. If possible, interactive questioning can be used to elicit more content for evaluation and explanations for discrepancies. The reader is cautioned to consider factual discrepancies, potential motives, implausible content, and logical inconsistencies, as what Ekman (2009) called “hot spots.” The idea is that the various indicators of deception are best considered as warnings of possible deceit rather



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than hard proof of actual deceit. Factual discrepancies can be honest mistakes. Not everyone who has a motive to lie actually lies (Levine, Kim & Hamel, 2010). Unusual and atypical things sometimes happen. People are not always logically consistent. The good lie detector triangulates various types of information, asks follow‐up questions when possible, and after‐ the‐fact fact checks to make the most informed judgments possible while recognizing uncertainty. The down sides to listening for deception are suspicion and distraction. Being suspicious of others may reduce our sympathy and empathy toward the people we are suspicious of. Lying and deceit are generally socially disapproved, and liars and deceivers are not viewed positively (Levine, 2020). Being suspicious of someone suggests that they are not trustworthy and their communication cannot be accepted in good faith. This is unfortunate if the suspicion is misplaced. Further, listening for deception may distract people from listening for non‐deceptive content. Focusing on identifying deception almost certainly limits focus on other aspects of communication. In conclusion, being a good lie detector requires good listening skills. Listening is critical to lie detection because of the key role of communication content understood in context. This said, being a good listener may interfere with deception detection when listening from a truth‐ default state. Abandoning the truth‐default, while essential for deception detection, entails suspicion and distraction which may inhibit effective listening for non‐deceptive communication. It is a conundrum.

References Aamodt, M. G., & Custer, H. (2006). Who can best catch a liar. Forensic Examiner, 15, 6–11. Blair, J. P., Levine, T. R., & Shaw, A. J. (2010). Content in context improves deception detection accuracy. Human Communication Research, 36, 423–442. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468‐2958. 2010.01382.x Blair, J. P., Reimer, T. O., & Levine, T. R. (2018). The role of consistency in detecting deception: The superiority of correspondence over coherence. Communication Studies, 69, 483–498. https:// doi.org/10.1080/10510974.2018.1447492 Bond, C. F., & The Global Deception Research Team (2006). A world of lies. Journal of Cross‐Cultural Psychology, 37, 60–74. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022105282295 Bond, C. F., Jr., & DePaulo, B. M. (2006). Accuracy of deception judgments. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10, 214–234. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr1003_2 Bond, C. F., Jr., Howard, A. R., Hutchison, J. L., & Masip, J. (2013). Overlooking the obvious: Incentives to lie. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 35, 212–221. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 01973533.2013.764302 Bond, C.F., Jr., Levine, T. R., & Hartwig, M. (2015). New findings in nonverbal lie detection. In P.A.  Granhag, A. Vrij, & B. Vershuere (Eds.), Deception detection: Current challenges and new ­directions (pp. 37–58). Chichester: Wiley. Buller, D. B., & Burgoon, J. K. (1996). Interpersonal deception theory. Communication Theory, 6, 203–242. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468‐2885.1996.tb00127.x Clare, D. D. & Levine, T. R. (2019). Documenting the truth‐default: The low frequency of spontaneous, unprompted veracity assessments in deception detection. Human Communication Research, 45, 286–308. https://doi.org/10.1093/hcr/hqz001 DePaulo, B. M. (1992). Nonverbal behavior and self‐presentation. Psychological Bulletin, 111, 203–243. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0033‐2909.111.2.203 DePaulo, B. M., Lindsay, J. J., Malone, B. E., Muhlenbruck, L., Charlton, K., & Cooper, H. (2003). Cues to Deception. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 74–118. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033‐ 2909.129.1.74 Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1969). Nonverbal leakage and clues to deception. Psychiatry, 32, 88–106. https://doi.org/10.1080/00332747.1969.11023575

350 Levine Ekman, P. (2009). Telling lies. New York: W. W. Norton. Ford, C. V. (1996). Lies! Lies!! Lies!!!: The psychology of deceit. Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Association. Hartwig, M., & Bond, C. F., Jr. (2011). Why do lie‐catchers fail? A lens model meta‐analysis of human lie judgments. Psychological Bulletin, 137, 643–659. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0023589 Hartwig, M., Granhag, P. A., Stromwall, L. A., & Kronkvist, O. (2006). Strategic use of evidence during police interviews: When training to detect deception works. Law and Human Behavior, 30, 603–619. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979‐006‐9053‐9 Levine, T. R. (2014). Truth‐default Theory (TDT): A theory of human deception and deception detection. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 33, 378–392. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0261927X14535916 Levine, T. R. (2014). Active deception detection. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1, 122–128. https://doi.org/10.1177/2372732214548863 Levine, T. R. (2015). New and improved accuracy findings in deception detection research. Current Opinion in Psychology, 6, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2015.03.003 Levine, T. R. (2018). Scientific evidence and cue theories in deception research: reconciling findings from meta‐analyses and primary experiments. International Journal of Communication, 12, 2461– 2479. Retrieved from https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/7838/2374 Levine, T. R. (2020). Duped: Truth‐default theory and the social science of lying and deception. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. Levine, T. R., Ali, M., Dean, M., Abdulla, R., & Garcia‐Ruano, K. (2016). Toward a pancultural typology of deception motives. Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, 45, 1–12. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/17475759.2015.1137079 Levine, T. R., Clare, D., Blair, J. P., McCornack, S. A., Morrison, K., & Park, H. S. (2014). Expertise in deception detection involves actively prompting diagnostic information rather than passive behavioral observation. Human Communication Research, 40, 442–462. https://doi.org/10.1111/ hcre.12032 Levine, T. R., Clare, D. D., Green, T., Serota, K. B., & Park, H. S. (2014). The effects of truth‐lie base rate on interactive deception detection accuracy. Human Communication Research, 40, 350–372. https://doi.org/10.1111/hcre.12027 Levine, T. R., Kim, R. K., & Blair, J. P. (2010). (In)accuracy at detecting true and false confessions and denials: An initial test of a projected motive model of veracity judgments. Human Communication Research, 36, 82–102. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468‐2958.2009.01369.x Levine, T. R., Kim, R. K., & Hamel, L. M. (2010). People lie for a reason: Three experiments documenting the principle of veracity. Communication Research Reports, 27, 271–285. https://doi.org/10.1 080/08824096.2010.496334 Levine, T. R., & McCornack, S. A. (2001). Behavioral adaption, confidence, and heuristic‐based ­explanations of the probing effect. Human Communication Research, 27, 471–502. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1468‐2958.2001.tb00790.x Levine, T. R., Park, H. S., & McCornack, S. A. (1999). Accuracy in detecting truths and lies: Documenting the “veracity effect.” Communication Monographs, 66, 125–144. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 03637759909376468 Levine, T. R., Serota, K. B., Shulman, H., Clare, D. D., Park, H. S., Shaw, A. S., … & Lee, J. H. (2011). Sender demeanor: Individual differences in sender believability have a powerful impact on deception detection judgments. Human Communication Research, 37, 377–403. https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.1468‐2958.2011.01407.x McCornack, S. A. (1992). Information manipulation theory. Communication Monographs, 59, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637759209376245 McCornack, S. A. (1997). The generation of deceptive messages: Laying the groundwork for a viable theory of interpersonal deception. In J. O. Greene (Ed.), Message production: Advances in communication theory (pp. 91–126). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. McCornack, S.A., Morrison, K., Paik, J. E., Wiser, A. M., & Zhu, X. (2014). Information Manipulation Theory 2: A propositional theory of deceptive discourse production. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 33, 348–377. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X14534656



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McCornack, S. A., & Parks, M. R. (1986). Deception detection and relational development: The other side of trust. In M.L. McLaughlin (Ed.), Communication Yearbook 9 (pp. 377–389). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Nahari, G., Vrij, A. & Fisher, R. P. (2014). Exploiting liars’ verbal strategies by examining the verifiability of details. Legal and Criminological Psychology, 19, 227–239. https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.2044‐8333.2012.02069.x Park, H. S., Levine, T. R., McCornack, S. A., Morrison, K., & Ferrara, M. (2002). How people really detect lies. Communication Monographs, 69, 144–157. https://doi.org/10.1080/714041710 Serota, K. B., & Levine, T. R. (2015). A few prolific liars: Variation in the prevalence of lying. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 34, 138–157. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X14528804 Serota, K. B., Levine, T. R., & Boster, F. J. (2010). The prevalence of lying in America: Three studies of self‐reported lies. Human Communication Research, 36, 2–25. https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.1468‐2958.2009.01366.x Vrij, A. (2015). A cognitive approach to lie detection. In P. A. Granhag, A. Vrij, & B. Verschuere (Eds.), Deception detection: Current challenges and new approaches (pp. 205–229). Chichester, UK: Wiley.

23

Mediated Listening Christopher D. Bond

Redefining Listening Through Technology Technology has and is expected to continually change the way we work, play, live, and listen within various contexts. Video conferencing has changed the nature of meetings, telemedicine has revolutionized healthcare delivery, and active learning technology has shifted our thinking about classrooms and boardrooms alike. Even our everyday affairs have been influenced. From mobile phone technology to social media, various hardware and software applications have both revolutionized and victimized our behavior, communication, and thoughts. Particularly relevant for this chapter, our listening, or lack thereof, has fundamentally changed as a result of technology (e.g., Gardner & Davis, 2013). This chapter focuses specifically on how technology helps or hinders the formation of listening spaces. While listening within technological contexts is fluid, it is this fluidity and perceptions of telepresence that set technological listening apart from other forms of listening (see, Stewart & Arnold, 2018).

Defining Technological Listening As Worthington and Bodie observe in the Introduction of this volume, definitions of listening vary by discipline. The same thing is true across contexts. What counts as listening in healthcare (see McKenna, et al., this volume), for instance, may not fully match with what counts as listening to music (see Johnson, this volume). If we consider technology a context, our attention turns to how we engage this activity when interacting online or in some other mediated space. In a way, then, our thoughts about listening will look similar to insights offered by Miller and Bailenson in their chapter on Augmented Reality. For instance, when interacting with others through some sort of technology, our perceptions of the environment (­telepresence), ourselves (self‐presence), and/or others (social presence) can be more or less similar to how we perceive those elements when we are engaged face‐to‐face. Oftentimes, we perceive our technologically‐mediated interactions as not mediated at all (i.e., that we are experiencing the interaction in a manner that feels like being co‐present with others; Gunawardena & Zittle, 1997; Lowenthal & Dennen, 2017; Phirangee & Malec, 2017; Worthington, Valikoski, Fitch‐Hauser, Imhof, & Kim, 2012). In many ways, listening

The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

354 Bond in online spaces mirrors listening in face‐to‐face settings: We construct meaning, foster engagement and connection, and facilitate responses as we would if we were interacting in a “real” (as opposed to “augmented”) space. Consequently, the listening space that we inhabit spans context. Feelings of presence can traverse technological spaces and can assist users in these spaces to facilitate the perception of an actual face‐to‐face context. In two unpublished studies, Bond (2016, 2018) surveyed college students about their perceptions of listening while interacting with someone on social media (e.g., real‐time chatting, sharing messages or pictures on social media). Of the 357 survey respondents, over two‐thirds (n = 242, 67.69%) agreed or strongly agreed that the receiver of their social media posts was actively listening to them. This finding supports claims that users of social media often perceive themselves as interacting within a ­typical face‐to‐face context, contributing to feelings of telepresence within their online environment. As Crawford (2009) suggested, interacting on social media can help create a “deep sense of connection that listening participants can feel in online spaces” (p. 526). Technological listening refers to the use of technology to foster a sense of connection and create, maintain, and enhance relationships. As such, this definition shares much in common with those offered by Manusov (this volume) and Pery, Doytch, and Kluger (this volume). This definition of technological listening, however, also includes how technology can be used within a typical face‐to‐face context and have positive or negative impacts on interactions and relationships (see also, Worthington et al., 2012). For example, as you read this paragraph on your laptop or tablet, you might be interrupted by your daughter who asks what time the zoo opens tomorrow. You minimize the document to open a browser, and after finding the zoo’s hours talk to her about visiting the zoo. A listening space was created through the convergence of you and your daughter talking, in conjunction with the technology use (laptop and Internet). Moreover, the resulting listening space has the capacity to enhance overall connection and engagement. In sum, technological listening can be defined as the process of converging present technology(ies), messages, and perceptions into a new listening space in an effort to construct meaning, foster engagement and connection, and facilitate a response. This definition of listening has some similarities to social listening (Stewart & Arnold, 2018); yet, social listening examines how we communicate and listen (or perhaps “monitor”) using social media or other communication technologies. Technological listening expands this notion by encompassing both technology as a context (social media, texting, other communication technologies) and technology use within a typical face‐to‐face context (e.g., laptop use during a classroom l­ecture, texting while talking to someone). Using this definition as a framework, I examine technology in two ways, first as a shared context, using the classroom and the workplace as specific examples, and, second, as context, with attention to social media and mobile phone applications (apps).

Technology as a Shared Context: The Classroom Modern classroom spaces make use of various technological devices including smartphones, laptops, iPads, smart watches, and other handheld devices. These devices allow students and faculty to communicate with one another both inside and outside the classroom. Likewise, many classrooms are now equipped with smartboards, televisions, computers, digital cameras, and projectors. Access to multimedia services, videoconferencing, and high‐quality audio and video capabilities has increased classroom interactivity (Faramarzi, Tabrizi, & Chalak, 2019; Alodwan & Almosa, 2018; Chen & Peng, 2008). While these technologies have the potential to foster more inclusive listening spaces, however, they also can create listening barriers when students and teachers are overwhelmed by the technologies they are asked to manage (Blackburn, LeFebvre, & Richardson, 2013). Moreover, electronic devices can act as a distraction to both users (e.g., surfing the Internet, multitasking) and observers (i.e., other students who are not using technology but who are watching their peers do so).



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Sheri Roster, a middle‐school English teacher in Missouri, outlines many of the challenges teachers today face: I started teaching [25 years ago] with a chalkboard and overhead projector. I got my first computer in the classroom back in the 90s...then the smartboard came with the dry erase board…My students are now texting me. I am sending emails to students and parents. …[W]e have so many days of training about using the new equipment and computers, but we never get trained on how to integrate [them] into dialogue… every teacher and student has issues with learning it. And, heaven forbid if something breaks...listening gets interrupted…instead of teaching a term or subject, we now say go Google it. Although we know not to say that (S. Roster, personal communication, September 30, 2019).

The conclusions reached by Ms. Roster are mirrored in other research (DeCoito & Richardson, 2018; Tindell & Bohlander, 2012) that indicate how technology manifests as a barrier to learning within the classroom. For example, attempts at multitasking are not uncommon for students, who take notes on their laptops while also trying to check for messages and social media updates; or students who follow along on their e‐book during lecture while trying to listen and respond to classroom discussion. Students are distracted by other students’ use of mobile phones and laptops in addition to the other classroom technologies (clickers, televisions, computers) (Sana, Weston, & Cepeda, 2013). Negotiating all the technology use within the classroom results in a larger technological listening barrier for both students and faculty. As technology access has increased in the classroom, training on how to integrate it into teacher and student classroom dialogue has lagged. Students have become managers of their own learning, but to do so successfully, they need to know how to effectively operate and communicate on various mediated technologies. Teachers experience some of the same issues as students, but must also improve learning constantly and meet pedagogical goals through this technology use (DeCoito & Richardson, 2018). As observed, technologies can create barriers and distractions that prevent the formation of listening spaces within the classroom or within the various technological devices (DeCoito & Richardson, 2018; Rahim & Soleymani, 2015). Additionally, students are often busy constructing and responding to messages on various technologies. This messaging is a cognitive act that can serve as a classroom distraction which, in turn, negatively affects a student’s engagement and connections to class lecture and discussion. Studies have shown that relevant messaging in class does not necessarily negatively impact student learning, while nonrelevant messaging can impact student learning and result in negative class outcomes (Kuznekoff & Titsworth, 2013; Kuznekoff, Munz, & Titsworth, 2015).

Technology as a Shared Space: The Workplace Like classrooms, workplaces, whether a factory, medical clinic, or an office, contain shared technologies that can prevent the formation of listening spaces. Factory workers, for instance, may be required to wear ear plugs for safety reasons (i.e., noisy equipment). These workers simply cannot hear nor listen and thus must rely on nonverbal communication. Travis Huff, a factory worker at a Kawasaki manufacturing facility, addressed this barrier when asked how he communicates and listens as work: It is loud. Period. The hum of all the machines, the clinging of equipment and tools, and people shouting…we literally shout to one another even if we are two feet apart...we do have quiet areas that are built to talk including the cafeteria, but these take time to walk to, and we don’t have time sometimes…I do wear earplugs but they don’t prevent all noises from the machines…I sometimes forget and shout at home or in other places. I sometimes feel like no one wants to listen to me at times…my ears kind of ring at all times now, but I am getting older. (T. Huff, personal interview, 30 September 2019)

356 Bond Customer service representatives (CSRs) working in call centers face their own set of challenges. These centers contain massive amounts of phones, computers, and other equipment that make it difficult for CSRs to listen (e.g., background noise of other representatives, headset feedback noise, noise from computers, etc.). Of course, CSRs are not the only professionals faced with increased time on technology at work. When engaged with a computer, workers create a cognitive space of more concentration and isolation with less engagement and connection to others. In support of this, the Technological Listening and Social Media (TLSM) survey indicated that approximately 67% of college students sampled agreed or strongly agreed that it was hard for them to listen if they were using a computer for work or a related task (but not for entertainment, e.g., social media or playing games) (Bond, 2016, 2018). As a result of the increased presence of technology at work, workers have to become more purposeful in their creation of opportunities to engage and connect. While many examples exist of listening barriers within the workplace, other studies do address how workplace listening can be fostered by access to technology. For example, people with disabilities are now able to telework and connect via computer technologies with able bodied workers, allowing listening spaces that may not occur in traditional “brick and mortar” workspaces. These listening spaces can foster community and workplace participation (Baker, Moon & Ward, 2006). In a study of data entry employees who were introduced to a new computer technology as part of their major job function, Papa and Glenn (1988) found that employees who received 15 hours of listening skills training performed at much higher levels when operating and interacting with the new technology than did employees who did not receive the training. Other studies have examined the importance of effective listening skills within the workplace, finding that listening skills in the workplace are connected with the educational level, geographic location, technology literacy, and a worker’s background information (e.g., Kumar, 2013; Jahromi, Tabatabaee, Abdar, & Rajabi, 2016; Longweni & Kroon, 2018).

Technology as Context: Mobile Phones and Apps As important as the classroom and workplace are, perhaps no context is more important for the study of listening than the mobile phone. The initial utility of the mobile phone was its built‐in microphone that was used to talk and listen to others during phone calls. With its many technological advances, first mobile phones, now smart phones have changed the way in which an individual communicates, coordinates, moderates, and listens. Listening spaces are being created through text messages, social media posts, and picture sharing, to name a few. These listening spaces are hosted by a plethora of apps, which, in turn, are hosted on smartphones. It is not the smartphone creating the listening space, but rather each communication‐ based application that the smartphone hosts. Another way to conceptualize an app is as an independent medium. Smartphones act like a multi‐media hub. Each social media or messaging app on a smartphone can create various levels of engagement and, in turn, can create various listening spaces. Another factor that influences listening space formation is an app’s technological sophistication or media richness (i.e., a communication medium’s ability to reproduce the information sent over it; Daft & Lengel, 1986). As technology becomes more advanced, media richness will increase along with its ability to create more successful listening spaces. It is through these new listening spaces that listening outcomes will increase when technology is the context (texting, social media use, app messaging) and when technology is the shared context (classrooms, workplaces, other interpersonal encounters). As our technology changes, our listening behaviors change with it, creating many future opportunities for research. I will explore social media listening as one example of how listening can be conceptualized within specific technologies.



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Social Media Listening

According to a 2019 Pew Research Center survey, popular social media apps like Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube, and Instagram all have a 70% or higher penetration in at least one age demographic. Even less popular apps like Twitter and Pinterest still have sizable followings (over 40% for some demographics). Moreover, the majority of social media users access their site‐of‐choice at least once a day, with some platforms showing 75–80% daily access (e.g., 77% of Snapchat users aged 18–29 reported daily use). In Bond’s TLSM study (2016, 2018) of American college students’ social media use, approximately 49% of the 357 respondents indicated they spend at least two to three or more hours a day on social media sites, while 31% of students reported they spent at least three to four hours or more a day. These self‐reports are probably conservative because mobile phones are always connected and are always producing messages. Although questions regarding time with technology were not included in the survey, the most recent “time study” did examine how much time college students reported listening (24%) as compared to daily speaking (20%) with students trading‐in face‐to‐face time with others by using the Internet or other mediated items (Janusik & Wolvin, 2009). Speaking and listening time is likely to be even lower today with the rise of social media, streaming video, and various new and established smartphone apps that facilitate messaging. Indeed, Gardner & Davis (2013) described the so‐called app generation  –  the “highly connected, yet not connected” generation. Social media users and the smartphone apps they use, billions of messages a day producing more data and a need for an ever-increasing digital storage space. In his vodcast, The Internet of Things, Turner (2014) indicated “the digital universe is large – by 2020 containing nearly as many digital bits as there are stars in the universe. It is doubling in size every two years, and by 2020 the digital universe – the data we create and copy annually – will reach 44 zettabytes, or 44 trillion gigabytes.” To put this into perspective, each minute (Marr, 2018; Kapko, 2015): ●● ●●

●● ●● ●● ●●

Facebook averages 51,000 posts, Instagram averages 1.7 million likes on its pictures and videos (and has over 400 million daily users), 17,361 LinkedIn profiles are viewed and 120 new professional members join, approximately 456,000 Tweets are sent, over 527,000 pictures are shared on Snapchat, and around 41.6 million messages are sent on WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

When usage data are coupled with the amount of social media messages sent per minute, it is clear that few users can attend to all messages from their friends or followers across all social media apps. Users must engage in the process of “tuning‐in” to social media messages in order to connect or become engaged. Messages on social media occur constantly throughout the day, but only those that we want to attend to and choose to engage with can create a listening space and lead to technological listening. Crawford (2009) compared these social media messages to the radio, operating in the background and “becoming the texture of everyday life” (p. 531). Many social media users demand the constant and excessive flow of messages, but through the muddle of messages, a user must decide which messages require attention and engagement, and thus require the creation of a listening space through selective listening. This constant selective listening may create a cluttered technological listening space or cognitive overhead (Conklin, 1987). This cognitive overhead refers to how users are required to make decisions about decisions, or in other words, how users decide on what messages to listen to, and which ones to ignore. A social media user who is receiving messages on both a computer and mobile phone, for instance, makes decisions regarding the relevance, speed, and need for engagement and connection of each message. This cognitive overhead can cause social media users stress, and may limit the creation of as well as the ­success of technological listening spaces.

358 Bond But what does listening mean in the context of social media? One college student responding to the TLSM survey (Bond, 2016, 2018) best explained the benefit of listening with social media, noting: Listening does not always have to be through the exchange of words, though, but I will see some people sharing or retweeting posts, signifying that they read/listened to someone’s message, and that they wanted to share it with others. Listening can also be demonstrated through liking someone’s post or commenting on it. It shows that you listened to what someone had to say and you wanted to support them or open it up to discussion.

Listening spaces on social media can take many forms just as social media can take many forms, especially in regard to message type and length. As Jackson (2017) noted, social media allows for an endless number of posts and message lengths and, as a result, users need to keep “posts short and concise…longer posts also get cut off in a user’s feed, which forces them to expand the text and not pay attention to the message.” Many social media platforms, such as Facebook and SnapChat, focus more on personal relationships and are thus less formal. Other platforms are more professional in nature (e.g., LinkedIn, Xing) allowing users to make and develop professional contacts. Still other platforms focus more on picture or video sharing (e.g., YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest), while allowing users to interact in comment sections. Moreover, new social media platforms are constantly being developed. They may be popular in just one country, or have a worldwide following. New platforms on the web and messaging apps continue to increase as alternatives to typical SMS (mobile phone texts) are sought. For example, while SnapChat surpassed Instagram climbing to the top social media site used among teens in Fall 2017 (Snapchat, 2017), Instagram is well on its way to recovering its lost marketshare (Instagram, 2019). According to Business of Apps (Iqbal, 2019), TikTok has risen to the third most popular social media app download, with 80 million downloads in 2018 and 40 million active users in America alone. Researchers must actively examine how users are communicating and accessing these apps, and specifically, how they help (or discourage) the creation of listening spaces.

Summary Technology can affect listening in unique and profound ways. In some ways, technology serves to enhance listening, serving to create listening spaces that bolster our abilities to connect and engage. In other ways, technology serves as an impediment to effective listening, acting to distract or otherwise consume our attention. The challenge that we face often rests in determining whether technology use is assisting or distracting. As technological advances are inevitable, listening spaces will be altered and created differently. More and constant research is needed to understand how these new technologies create listening spaces, how users perceive telepresence and, in turn, foster technological listening.

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360 Bond Marr, B. (2018, May 21). How much data is created every minute? The mind‐blowing stats everyone should read. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2018/05/21/ how‐much‐data‐do‐we‐create‐ever y‐day‐the‐mind‐blowing‐stats‐ever yone‐should‐read/ #5a4ec26e60ba Pew Research Center. (2019, April 10). Share of U.S. adults using social media, including Facebook, is mostly unchanged since 2018. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact‐tank/2019/04/10/ share‐of‐u‐s‐adults‐using‐social‐media‐including‐facebook‐is‐mostly‐unchanged‐since‐2018 Papa, M. J., & Glenn, E. C. (1988). Listening ability and performance with new technology: A case study. International Journal of Business Communication, 25, 5–15. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/002194368802500401 Phirangee, K., & Malec, A. (2017). Othering in online learning: an examination of social presence, identity, and sense of community. Distance Education, 38, 160–172. https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919. 2017.1322457 Rahim, M., & Soleymani, E. (2015). The impact of mobile learning on listening anxiety and listening comprehension. English Language Teaching, 8(10). Retrieved from https://files.eric.ed.gov/ fulltext/EJ1079080.pdf Sana, F., Weston, T., & Cepeda, N. J. (2013). Laptop multitasking hinders classroom learning for both users and nearby peers. Computers & Education, 62, 24–31. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. compedu.2012.10.003 Snapchat furthers its lead as teens’ favorite social platform, BUT… (2017, October 16). Marketing Charts. Retrieved from https://www.marketingcharts.com/digital/social‐media‐80744 Stewart, M., & Arnold, C. (2018). Defining social listening: Recognizing an emerging dimension of listening. International Journal of Listening, 32, 85–100. https://doi.org/10.1080/10904018.2017. 1330656 Tindell, D. R., & Bohlander, R. W., (2012). The use and abuse of cell phones and text messaging in the classroom: A survey of college students. College Teaching, 60, 1–9. Turner, V. (2014). The digital universe of opportunities: Rich data and the increasing value of the Internet of Things (IoT). [Vodcast]. EMC Digital Universe with Research & Analysis by IDC. Retrieved from https://www.emc.com/leadership/digital‐universe/2014iview/index.htm Worthington, D. L, Valikoski, T., Fitch‐Hauser, M., Imhof, M., & Kim, S. (2012). Listening and privacy management in cell phone conversations among young adults: A cross cultural comparison of Finnish, German, Korean, & United States students. Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication, 3, 43–60. https://doi.org/10.1386/ejpc.3.1.43_1

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Listening and Relational Lawyering Susan L. Brooks

Legal professionals spend much of their time listening to others, including clients, witnesses, co‐workers, and judges. And yet, lawyers are notorious for being poor listeners. A 2006 ABA Journal eReport indicated that 70% of large law firm clients were dissatisfied with their lawyers (Prufer, 2006). The primary reasons for dissatisfaction were not about the outcomes or the cost of service; rather clients were upset with the lawyers’ poor communication skills, particularly their poor listening skills. The lack of effective listening skills among lawyers is unsurprising given that listening traditionally has not been identified or taught as a core set of skills in the law school curriculum. Legal education historically has centered on legal reasoning and analysis, with some attention to legal research and writing. Even when courses feature listening skills, they are typically electives. Consequently, few students receive this training. One way to understand this deficiency is to appreciate that the American legal system approaches human relationships with an individualistic and a mostly adversarial, or at best, a transactional orientation. This orientation lies at the foundation of our laws, which focus almost exclusively on individual rights and responsibilities and are rooted in skepticism about human nature and distrust of others. As a result, even where listening skills have been taught, the goals have often been highly instrumental: To solve the most immediate problem, check‐ the‐box, and do the arms‐length transaction. The awareness of these shortcomings within the field of law and legal training is not entirely new. For decades, legal academics have critiqued the absence of listening pedagogy in law schools. Only recently, however, have law schools begun identifying listening skills as a core competency necessary for their graduates, and considering more systematically how and where listening can be taught within the curriculum (Holloran Center, n.d.). Some legal academics have begun advocating for increased listening pedagogy as part of a broader set of relational perspectives and practices. A relational approach, which I refer to as “Relational Lawyering,” starts with the premise that all human beings are interconnected and share the same basic needs and interests. In this chapter, I discuss the evolution of listening within the legal profession mostly through the lens of recent changes in legal education and training. First, I chart the historical context of traditional legal education noting the absence of listening pedagogy despite empirical ­evidence supporting the prominence of listening among the lawyering skills clients value most. Next, I highlight developments contributing to listening being viewed as a core competency The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

362 Brooks and identify newer pedagogical frameworks and tools for incorporating listening pedagogy into the training of legal professionals. Building on this foundation, I then discuss how effective listening is being redefined more holistically using a Relational Lawyering approach and describe what it means to teach listening as a part of this framework. Finally, I outline future directions for teaching listening within the legal field.

Listening Pedagogy in Law and What Clients Want To appreciate the dramatic evolution in how listening skills are treated within the legal profession, we first must understand how lawyers generally have been trained and how that training falls short of client expectations.

Traditional Legal Education Traditional legal education in America has been approached primarily as an academic discipline emphasizing the teaching of legal reasoning and analysis using appellate opinions. Law students are taught first to identify the “legally relevant facts,” then to determine the legal issues and use the courts’ written opinions to understand their reasoning; and, finally, to determine which aspects of the opinions will serve as precedents to be followed or distinguished in future cases. Beyond legal reasoning and analysis, first‐year law students generally also receive instruction in legal research and writing skills. Outside of this “core curriculum,” most law schools offer limited opportunities – mainly through experiential components of the curriculum – for students to learn listening skills. Yet, even where these opportunities present themselves, the pedagogical approaches used by law faculty are inconsistent and vary in their effectiveness (Brooks, 2012). For instance, a typical law school listening exercise consists of role‐playing a mock attorney–client interview, with a classmate usually playing the “client.” Students often are given very little theory or context and are instructed simply to practice active or reflective listening by repeating back to the client what has been said using the client’s words. This approach may well be useful as a component of teaching listening, and yet it falls short when taught in isolation, as has historically been the case in legal training.

What Clients Want The absence of effective listening pedagogy as a core component of legal education contrasts sharply with client preferences regarding their legal representation and treatment. Often framed in terms of procedural fairness and procedural justice, research suggests people affected by the legal system are willing to accept a wider range of outcomes, including those less favorable to their self‐interests, if they experience the processes as being fair (Tyler, 2003). A key element of procedural fairness is the quality of interpersonal treatment. Tyler (2003) noted that in addition to be being treated with dignity and respect, both of which are attributes of good listening (Bodie, St. Cyr, Pence, Rold, & Honeycutt, 2012), clients value the quality of decision‐making (i.e., unbiased, open, even‐handed). They also report greater satisfaction with procedures that allow them to tell their story and communicate their views about how their matter should be handled. Most importantly, they want to be able to “state [their] views to an authority and to feel those views are being considered” (Tyler, 2003, p. 300). Tyler’s work has been heavily promoted by a number of judges. For example, a white paper published by trial court judges Kevin Burke and Steven Leben (2007–2008) recommended that individual judges prioritize effective listening, writing: “Learn how to listen better.



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Listening is not the absence of talking” (p. 18). They went on to state that the first step is good self‐analysis, and that all judges have strengths and weaknesses and can learn to become better listeners. Cunningham (2013) provided additional support for the importance of approaching listening as linked to a wider range of interpersonal skills. His descriptive review of research found that the most common reasons clients are dissatisfied with their lawyers relate to poor communication skills rather than dissatisfaction with the results or fees. For instance, BTI Consulting Group’s (2006) study of corporate law firms highlighted the “failure to listen, non‐responsiveness, and arrogance,” as subcategories that showed up prominently (as cited in Cunningham, 2013). In another study of professional negligence claims, North and North (1994) noted that, “[b]y far the most significant cause of professional negligence claims was not dissatisfaction with outcome but instead related to the handling of the client relationship; the most frequent problems were failure to listen to the client, failure to ask appropriate questions, and failure to explain relevant aspects of the matter” (as cited in Cunningham, 2013). Cunningham (2013) largely attributed the failure to listen and otherwise communicate ­effectively to fundamental misunderstandings of the lawyer’s role, writing: “This specialist with a ‘big reputation’ interrupts the client precisely because she assumes from her expertise that she has heard enough to ‘get the picture’ and to decide what needs to be done” (p. 48). All the studies he examined showed that effective communication, including attentive and patient listening and clear explanations, is valued by clients because it improves the exchange of information and also because it is essential to the development of rapport, trust, and mutual respect.

Embracing Listening as a Newly Essential Skill for Lawyers The good news is that over the past 25 years both legal practice and the legal academy have begun to value listening, as seen in its recognition as a core skill and an inextricable part of the teaching of relational skills. This section highlights a number of these developments.

External Developments Concerns About Law Graduates’ “Practice‐readiness”

For decades, legal practitioners and judges criticized legal education for its failure to prepare its graduates adequately for professional practice. Then, in 1992, an American Bar Association (ABA) task force published the MacCrate Report, which made specific recommendations to law schools to provide more real‐world opportunities to teach the knowledge, skills, and values necessary to graduate conscientious, caring, and ethical legal professionals (ABA, 1992). Fifteen years later, the Carnegie Foundation published its own report as a part of its wider investigation of professional education. The Carnegie Report again pointed out a gap between legal education and practice, and emphasized the need for law schools to teach skills and values, particularly those connected to what it called the “third apprenticeship,” which refers to fostering law students’ sense of professional identity and purpose. Sullivan and his co‐ authors (2007) called for law schools to develop clear and consistent pedagogical approaches connected to professional identity formation. Surveys of legal employers provide additional support for claims that law schools need to devote more time and attention toward helping students cultivate professional traits and abilities such as effective listening skills. For instance, Shultz and Zedeck (2008) identified 26 “lawyering effectiveness skills” most sought after by legal employers. Listening is explicitly listed as a communication skill and implicitly included in others. For example, conflict resolution includes the ability “to see the world through the eyes of others” (pp. 26–27). Gerkman

364 Brooks and Cornett (2016) reported similar findings in their survey of legal employers. These employers were equally, if not more, concerned about hiring law graduates who possess character traits and abilities connected to strong interpersonal skills, such as effective listening, as they were about hiring lawyers with strong analytical and reasoning abilities. The call to action that emerged from these and related studies has been answered with greater interest in and willingness to teach competencies such as listening in law schools as part of an effort to help students cultivate the skills and values necessary for forming a professional identity.

Regulatory Requirements: Institutional Learning Outcomes

Regulatory changes by the ABA, the accrediting body for all law schools, also have played a significant role in the expansion of listening pedagogy within legal education. In 2015, the ABA began requiring law schools to provide a minimum of six credits of experiential coursework to all law students (i.e., simulation‐based courses and supervised practices courses, including legal clinics and field placements) (for a full description of current standards, see ABA, 2018). This change in standards has contributed to a dramatic expansion in experiential legal education, which in turn has brought greater attention to teaching interpersonal skills, including listening skills. In 2017, the ABA also enacted new standards requiring all law schools to identify and publish institutional learning outcomes, and then demonstrate that they are assessing those learning outcomes at formative and summative levels within the law school curriculum (see ABA, 2018, for a full description). To date, at least two dozen law schools identify “active listening” among their institutional objectives (Holloran Center, n.d.). Inclusion of listening and related communication skills requires consideration of where and how they are taught and assessed.

Internal Developments Expansion of Experiential and Alternative Dispute Resolution Offerings

As mentioned above, experiential legal education has expanded dramatically at all American law schools. Some of this expansion has taken place through the growth of legal clinics, in which students provide some form of legal services or legal advocacy to clients through “firms” housed at law schools. Probably an even larger part of the expansion has occurred through the proliferation of field placement programs (e.g., public interest and government settings, law firms, judicial chambers, and in‐house legal departments at corporations and non‐profit entities). At the same time, law schools have expanded the courses and programs devoted to alternative dispute resolution (ADR) (e.g., mediation, negotiation). The significant expansion of experiential courses has also increased the focus on teaching interpersonal skills, including the introduction of tools and frameworks that place listening skills within more holistic approaches to interacting with others as legal professionals. For example, the Five Habits of Cross‐Cultural Lawyering (Bryant & Peters, 2001) grounds its approach to listening on the premise that all of us are cultural beings, and all communication is cross‐ cultural. Bryant and Peters translated these habits into daily practices and tools for reflection. Habit Three, which is perhaps the best known and most frequently taught habit, is called “Parallel Universe Thinking.” It requires the learner to seek “other possible explanations or meanings for clients’ words and actions” (Bryant & Peters, 2007, p. 186). Developing a habit of parallel universe thinking requires the law student or lawyer to use listening in a different way – to slow down, pause, and reflect on what they have heard from the client, and to apply empathy to how they contextualize their understanding of the client and the client’s situation. Bryant and Peters (2007) also described three dynamics that contribute to a student’s cross‐ cultural sensitivity: (i) non‐judgment; (ii) isomorphic attribution; and (iii) daily practice and learnable skill. Non‐judgment, as it sounds, centers on avoiding evaluation and judgment.



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Isomorphic attribution occurs when the student‐listener aims to view a client’s conduct using the speaker‐client’s own lens, rather than solely interpreting that conduct from the lawyer’s perspective. This dynamic requires deep and empathic listening, along with heightened self‐ awareness, including an appreciation of one’s own cultural biases. Significantly, Bryant and Peters emphasized the importance of daily application of these practices, as it helps normalize the idea that genuine student learning requires constant reinforcement as well as thoughtfulness and reflection. Helping law students cultivate the ability to engage in meaningful reflection is widely recognized as a core element of clinical legal education. The proliferation of ADR courses and programs has also contributed toward expanding and deepening the understanding of effective listening and its pedagogy. For example, Gary Friedman (2015) offered a model both for helping students and conflict professionals appreciate the theoretical underpinnings as well as practices that can contribute to more effective listening. His approach incorporates mindfulness and meditation practices, which can lead to deeper points of connection with clients and others (see also Jones & Mulawa, this volume). As part of this process, conflict professionals explore their own experiences, such that they: ●● ●●

●● ●●

become more present and aware; deal with strong emotional reactions in a way that enables them to feel deep and authentic empathy for their clients; connect their inner experience to the conflict manifesting in the outer world; and deepen their motivation to handle conflict so they can continue to do the work without getting burned out or overwhelmed.

Friedman’s (2015) work is grounded in several underlying premises that challenge t­ raditional, transactional approaches to law, listening, and mediation. He believes solutions to conflicts depend on interpretations and feelings below the surface. Friedman recognizes it is not possible for a conflict professional, even a supposedly neutral mediator, to participate in conflict resolution without experiencing human biases and reactions. These ideas translate into a set of practices, including a particular listening practice he calls “looping.” In looping, the listener seeks to mirror the speaker’s emotions as well as the content of the communication, to help ensure the speaker is fully heard.

Infusion of Critical Legal Perspectives

Efforts to apply critical thinking from other disciplines to the field of law have also contributed to a greater willingness to incorporate communication and listening skills into legal education and training. These law reform initiatives have been spurred by deep aspirations toward ­shifting the culture of the legal profession in a more humanistic and inclusive direction (e.g., critical race studies, critical feminist studies, therapeutic jurisprudence, integrative law). Perhaps the earliest and most influential of these movements is the Critical Legal Studies movement. The work of one of its leaders, Peter Gabel (2012, 2014, 2015), exemplifies the philosophical shift that is reshaping the understanding of listening within the legal profession. Gabel poses a counterpoint to the still dominant individualistic view that presupposes an inherent antagonism between self and other. He suggests that while an individual rights framework served us in the past, in today’s world it functions to create a social distortion that prevents people from realizing and acting on their fundamental need for mutual recognition. Gabel’s (2012) perspective emphasizes our connectedness. He believes embracing this ­paradigm, which is essentially a relational framework, can move us: toward a new vision of law and legal culture that seeks to foster empathy, compassion, reconciliation with the other, and the fundamental rediscovery that the other is not essentially a threat, but the source of our completion as social beings (p. 20).

366 Brooks Under this approach, listening transforms into a set of practices and habits of mind that embrace our mutuality and shared humanity and create deeper points of connection.

Growing Interest in Mindfulness and Law

Another significant contributor has been the “contemplative lawyering” movement (Magee, 2010). Key components of this movement are mindfulness and meditation, which have become a popular focus of training in law schools, law firms, bar associations, and judicial education institutes. A number of scholars have explored the benefits of mindfulness for legal professionals. Like Gary Friedman, discussed in the preceding section, many of these authors focus specifically on how mindfulness can improve listening and relationship skills. For instance, Jeena Cho, author of the book (2014) and blog, The Anxious Lawyer, singled out improved listening skills as a means for attorneys to become more mindful, noting that it enhances conversation with clients and, at the same time, helps them tune into their own inner state of being. Scott Rogers (2018), who publishes on and teaches mindfulness to law students, described mindful listening as “noticing the thoughts, feelings, and body sensations that arise in the midst of conversation” (para. 7). What is going on internally for us often influences our decision‐making and actions (e.g., lack of attention, interrupting). Rogers suggested that the basic mindfulness practice of focused attention can help lawyers notice when their minds begin to wander and direct their attention back to the speaker. Rhonda Magee’s contributions to the contemplative lawyering movement have helped shape understandings of how contemplative practices, including mindful listening, can contribute to social justice and inclusivity in law and in the legal profession. She stated that the goal of contemplative lawyering is “to help lawyers and clients develop the capacity to put themselves in the shoes of another, to listen more thoroughly to another with as little judgment as they can manage” (Contemplative Lawyering, 2016, para. 5). Magee suggested that contemplative lawyering can help professionals slow down the listening process and increase awareness of personal biases, enabling them to respond to others and themselves with greater empathy and compassion and less judgment.

Concerns About Attorney Well‐being and Self‐care

Interest in mindfulness within the legal profession has grown, in part, in response to the high rates of depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and suicide of legal professionals. A 2016 ABA task force report shed light on the lack of well‐being within the legal profession and offered concrete recommendations (Brafford et al., 2017). The authors of the report proposed a multi‐dimensional approach that considers a lawyer’s social connectedness and emotional health as well as spirituality or sense of purpose, alongside physical and occupational health. The orientation of the report toward promoting well‐being rather than simply decreasing dysfunction and mental illness reflects its emphasis on positive psychology. The report addressed issues such as how to build on an attorney’s or legal institution’s existing strengths, rather than only seeing deficits and risks, and the capacity in all of us to shift from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset, along with its attendant benefits. Effective listening, which includes listening for strengths, is one method available to attorneys to adopt a growth mindset.

Re‐defining Listening Pedagogy as a Core Practice of Relational Lawyering The developments and emerging perspectives described here complement each other and, when considered together, represent a shift toward holistic approaches to teaching listening within legal education and the legal profession. Holistic approaches contextualize listening as



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a core skill set within larger frameworks that engage with intra‐personal, interpersonal, and systemic dimensions of human interaction. This section outlines one such approach called Relational Lawyering (Brooks, 2012, 2015, 2018; Brooks & Madden, 2010, 2011/2012) and then uses a relational framework to propose a new listening pedagogy for legal education and the legal profession. Relational Lawyering begins with the premise that all beings are interconnected and share the same basic needs and interests. The goal of relational lawyering, and of listening pedagogy, is for legal professionals to engage with others and pursue their professional roles in ways that affirm this mutuality and connection. The theoretical underpinnings of this framework are based on three areas of competency grounded in social science that all legal professionals need to be truly effective: ●●

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appreciating the importance of context and, specifically, the interconnected, interdependent context in which all living beings are situated; promoting individual and community choices around legal process that contribute to greater procedure justice and peace‐building; and heightening awareness and appreciation of cultural, emotional, and affective dimensions of legal practice (Brooks & Madden, 2010, 2011/2012).

The theory has been translated into a set of guiding principles and practices, including ­ ractices connected to listening. This work is about cultivating habits of mind to reinforce and p strengthen lawyers’ sense of connectedness and mutuality and allow them to engage in meaningful conversations across differences with the goal of creating new possibilities. These ideas have been expressed as guidance on fostering “wholehearted lawyers” (Brooks, 2018; for additional background, see Brown, 2010; Palmer, 2011; and Gabel, 2015), a term used to emphasize the need for legal professionals to be more “heart‐centered,” to incorporate more than solely analytical thinking to be truly effective in doing relational work. The first principle is about lawyering with kindness and curiosity in order to create a ­supportive and inclusive legal culture. Two other qualities that emanate from kindness and curiosity are humility and transparency. Humility informs curiosity. It is the willingness to acknowledge that in virtually every situation we truly do not know what another person is thinking or feeling. Transparency is informed by respect for the dignity of others. The second principle is that everyone wants to matter – everyone wants to be seen and heard. The critically important nature of “mattering” has been shown in numerous empirical studies (e.g., Elliott, Kao & Grant, 2004; Rosenberg & McCullough, 1981; Schlossberg, 1989), though it also makes good sense. What motivates us as human beings is not simply about acquiring wealth or fame, or even knowing that others care for us. We also want to know that our existence makes a difference in the world. In interacting with others as legal professionals, we need to let them know every one of them matters. Third is the importance of context, which includes appreciation of our own contexts as well as the contexts of others. This principle encompasses the importance of awareness of culture and values as aspects of the complex and varied contexts each of us brings into every interaction, as do clients, other lawyers, judges, witnesses, clerks, etc. To be effective in teaching and practicing law, attorneys need to instill the importance of contextualizing information and ideas at every turn. The fourth principle is to adopt a strengths orientation. When law teachers and students focus on their own and colleagues’ strengths, they are better able to develop a growth‐ oriented, optimistic mindset toward teaching and learning. Related to this orientation is Appreciative Inquiry (AI; see Hammond, 2013, for an overview), which can provide resources and guidance on how to think about strengths and how to incorporate a strengths orientation into law teaching and practice. For instance, AI can increase legal professionals’

368 Brooks ability to embrace and build upon their own assets and skills, which can lead to greater resilience when faced with the stress and potential secondary trauma connected to legal practice. The fifth and final principle is to apply an ethic of care. Carol Gilligan (2011) defined it as an ethic grounded in voice and relationships, in the importance of everyone being listened to carefully, in their own right, and on their own terms. This principle is very much about deep listening, emphasizing respect for and honoring the dignity of others (Gilligan, 2011; Ellmann, 1992–1993). An ethic of care also can help legal professionals create a positive vision of their roles and their potential impact on society.

The Practice of Listening in Relational Lawyering Gilligan’s definition of an ethic of care demonstrates the significance of listening as a core p ­ ractice of relational lawyering (other core elements include promoting self‐awareness and fostering empathy, compassion, and self‐compassion; Brooks, 2018). Elsewhere I have described effective listening as the willingness and ability to take in, remain open to, and hold space for what the other person is sharing; honoring, and valuing what another is offering in that moment. This approach can be called “generous listening” (Brooks, 2015; also see, Remen, 1996) and “whole body listening” (Arias & Mendelson, 2016), which reflect the recognition that meaningful listening requires both head and heart, along with awareness of bodily sensations. Effective listening for legal professionals is thus about listening deeply to hear and appreciate, rather than listening to respond. It is not about offering advice or solutions, and it is not about ­persuading the other person, or even sharing our own story that we may think is a lot like theirs. Rather, the aspiration in relational lawyering is to listen with the goal of creating a generative dialogue (see Isaacs, 1999; Bohm, 2004), meaning communication becomes a vehicle for generating new possibilities, rather than simply fixing problems. Nancy Kline (2010) referred to “listening to ignite,” writing that “[t]ransformative listening comes from genuine interest in where the person  will go next in their thinking. It comes from your courage to trust their intelligence” (Kline, 2010). Generative dialogue means finding ways of talking and knowing that allow us to transform who we are and what we do. Generative interactions create previously unavailable possibilities and have the potential to change how we act and who we are for the better. Listening is one of four activities in a generative dialogue. The others are respecting, ­voicing, and suspending. Suspending means holding our judgments to the side, which requires us to work actively to become more aware of our judgments, unconscious biases, and blind spots. For legal professionals, suspending is often difficult, in part because the role of attorney requires the exercise of judgment, or discernment, as well as advice‐giving on some level. In situations where a client’s story does not match up with the attorney’s sense of what took place, the attorney may jump to conclusions about the client being manipulative or untruthful. Listening generously – and generatively – can help legal professionals effectively work through such vexing situations. Contemplative lawyering can also offer invaluable tools for navigating this type of challenge. If legal professionals can slow down and focus on their role as listeners (cognitively, emotionally, and physically), they will succeed in staying more present and open to what they hear others saying, including their clients. Doing so requires an acceptance of some amount of uncertainty, which often clashes with attorneys’ natural desires for clarity and control. Using whole body listening allows legal professionals to slow the pace of their interactions so they can constructively draw upon their relational and legal knowledge, rather than simply assuming their interpretations are correct. In situations where clients’ stories don’t match up with legal professionals’ interpretations, the goal is to refrain from either reacting quickly or suppressing gut feelings. Rather, legal professionals can work on cultivating an ability to hold space for uncertainty while remaining open, caring, and compassionate toward clients and their stories.



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This approach to listening requires attorneys to be empathic toward the whole client, rather than only caring about the lawyer’s own view of the client and the particular legal matter at hand. Clients often tell attorneys things about themselves and their past actions that are complicated; these things may also be difficult to hear and accept. At that point, many attorneys stop listening. Generous, whole body listening requires attorneys to remain kind and curious (and humble and transparent) toward the client, along with putting the other relational principles into practice (mattering, strengths, and ethic of care). It also requires attorneys to notice their own thoughts and feelings as much as possible (i.e., be mindful), while accepting that they and their clients ultimately may agree or they may have to agree to disagree. Generous listening is not a truth‐finding mechanism; rather, it offers a way into the client’s experience, a way of appreciating and accepting the client fully as a human being. When considering a relational approach to listening in a broader legal context, these listening practices can enable opposing parties to see each other as people like themselves. This mutual recognition and affirmation may allow a given conflict to be resolved in a way that is not dependent on a strict competing rights model. Generous, whole body listening thus can help legal professionals become healers and peacemakers and, in the process, learn more about themselves and perhaps become better human beings.

Future Directions Within legal education, we can consider three distinct contexts for future development: (i) dedicated courses; (ii) experiential courses; and (iii) pervasive practices. I, along with many colleagues cited in this chapter, have developed dedicated law courses and programs to teach holistic approaches to listening (Silver, 2017). One big goal is for such courses and programs to continue to expand and to reach into the first year of law school. Second, the number of experiential courses and programs, such as legal clinics, externships, and pro bono programs likely will continue to grow, creating additional laboratories for teaching listening in real‐ world contexts and providing further opportunities for reflection. Third, perhaps the most helpful way legal educators can teach listening is by modeling effective listening skills in their everyday interactions with law students, both in and outside of the classroom. Such practices relate to the institutional culture or “hidden curriculum” of law schools. The highest aspiration for the future of listening in legal education and in the legal profession would thus be to use listening pedagogy to help transform legal culture into a culture of belonging. Of course, the longstanding reputation of lawyers as poor listeners will not disappear overnight. And yet, the legal profession is changing, as seen in the development and use of relational lawyering and other holistic approaches. As more legal professionals enter the field who have been trained in these and similar perspectives (e.g., contemplative lawyering, critical legal studies, meaningful experiential learning), the legal profession will begin to reap the benefits that accompany deep, generous, whole body listening  –  improved client satisfaction, attorney well‐being, and community healing.

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Gerkman, A., & Cornett, L. (2016, July 26). Foundations for practice: The whole lawyer and the character quotient. University of Denver: Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System. Retrieved from https://iaals.du.edu/publications/foundations‐practice‐whole‐lawyer‐and‐character‐quotient Gilligan, C. (2011, June 21). Care ethicists. [online interview]. Foundation Critical Ethics of Care. Retrieved from http://ethicsofcare.org/carol‐gilligan/ Hammond. S. A. (2013). The thin book of appreciative inquiry (3rd ed.). Bend, OR: Thin Book Publishing. Holloran Center. (n.d.) Learning outcomes 302(c) and (d): Active listening. University of St. Thomas School of Law. Retrieved from https://www.stthomas.edu/hollorancenter/resourcesforlegaleducators/ learningoutcomesdatabase/learningoutcomes302c/ Kline, N. (2010). Generative attention  –  Transformative listening. Retrieved from https://www. personallegacyadvisors.com/wp‐content/uploads/2010/12/Nancy‐Kline‐guidelines‐for‐ generative‐listening2.pdf Isaacs, W. (1999). Dialogue and the art of thinking together. New York: Doubleday. Magee, R. V. (2010). Educating lawyers to meditate? UMKC Law Review, 79, 535–594. Retrieved from https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1689769 Palmer, P. J. (2011). Healing the heart of democracy. San Francisco: Jossey‐Bass. Prufer, S. (2006, September 8). In‐house counsel axing law firms survey: 70 percent of big companies dissatisfied with primary outside counsel. ABA Journal eReport. Remen, R. (1996). Kitchen table wisdom. New York: Penguin. Rosenberg, M., & McCullough, B. C. (1981). Mattering: Inferred significance and mental health. Research in Community and Mental Health, 2, 163–182. Rogers, S. (2018, January 1). The mindful lawyer. What exactly is mindful listening? Florida Bar News. Retrieved from https://www.floridabar.org/the‐florida‐bar‐news/the‐mindful‐lawyer‐15/ Schlossberg, N. K. (1989). Marginality and mattering: Key issues in building community. New Directions for Student Services, 48, 5–15. https://doi.org/10.1002/ss.37119894803 Shultz, M. M., & Zedeck, S. (2008). Final research report: Identification, development, and validation of predictors for successful lawyering. Social Science Research Network. Retrieved from http:// works.bepress.com/marjorie_shultz/14/ Silver, M. A. (2017). Transforming justice, lawyers, and the practice of law. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Sullivan, W. M., Cobly, A., Wegner, J. W., Bond, L. & Shulman, L. S. (2007). Educating lawyers: Preparation for the profession of law. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Retrieved from http://archive.carnegiefoundation.org/pdfs/elibrary/elibrary_pdf_632.pdf Tyler, T. R. (2003). Procedural justice, legitimacy, and the effective rule of law. Crime and Justice, 30, 283–357. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1147701

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Listening in Health Care Lisa McKenna, Ted Brown, Louise Oliaro, Brett Williams, and Angela Williams

Both an art and a science, the health professional’s capacity to listen effectively and accurately is a fundamental professional attribute crucial to quality patient care outcomes. While listening has always been a focus of health professionals’ work, the focus has changed over time. Auscultation has been a fundamental skill for many health professionals in listening to internal sounds of patients’ bodies for centuries. More recently, there has been increased focus on more personal and narrative approaches underpinned by person‐centered care. This chapter explores the varied nature of listening in delivery of contemporary health care, key skills needed for effective listening in the clinical environment, challenges faced in effective listening in health care, and contexts of empathic listening within health care delivery. It examines complexities of listening in health care as well as challenges faced by health professionals in listening and responding appropriately.

Listening Between the Lines: Listening as a Therapeutic Tool in Health Care Listening, whether electronically, telephonically, or face‐to‐face, is the heart of modern health care (van Dulmen, 2017), especially in the delivery of service to patients and families whose voices must count (Finset, Bieber, Brown, Deveugele, & Pieterse, 2017). Listening can help limit over‐medicalizing patients, as it reveals more about patients – their illnesses/conditions, worries, and health care priorities. Alternatively, poor listening between health professionals and patients (and their families) may result in adverse medical events, less optimal treatment outcomes, misunderstandings, misdiagnoses (Davis, Thompson, Foley, Bond, & DeWitt, 2008) as well as errors in care (Davis, Foley, Crigger, & Brannigan, 2008). Effective listening in clinical practice provides the basis for patient‐centered care, individualized therapeutic plans, and improved patient outcomes (Hancock, Bonner, Hollingdale, & Madden, 2012). It improves medical, nursing, and allied health care students’ patient assessment skills, ­perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors (Anderson, Ford, & Thorpe, 2011; King et al., 2017). It is integral to health practitioner/patient relationships, creating, fostering, and strengthening a foundation of trust, rapport, and dignity (Dickson, Riddell, Gilmour, & McCormack, 2017; van

The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Dulmen, 2017; Davis, Foley et  al., 2008). Receptive conversation enables patients to express their  views and communicate details of their illness through their own experiences (Steihaug, Gulbrandsen, & Werner, 2012). Importantly, the art and science of listening as therapeutic communication in health care is more than a communication tool. Active listening requires presence, engagement, and time (Geller & Porges, 2014). A study by Greenstein, Arora, Staisiunas, Banerjee, and Farnan (2013) found when hospital staff actively listened, they were less likely to make errors or be interrupted. The authors also found that presence was a necessary condition for listening. Intricately linked to the perception of a health practitioner’s ability to understand a patient’s and family’s narrative is the perception of the health practitioner being present with the purpose to listen, facilitate, and create connection. More often than not, pressures of deliv­ ering health care lead to shortened time with patients and reduced opportunities to listen (Cocksedge & May, 2005). Patients highly value listening skills, viewing them as fundamental to professional compe­ tence and as essential elements in their interactions with health professionals (van Dulmen, 2017; Bendapudi, Berry, Frey, Parish, & Rayburn, 2006). Outram, Murphy, and Cockburn (2004) conducted a series of semi‐structured interviews to better understand factors affecting midlife women’s choices in seeking professional help for mental health issues. Approximately 70% of the 309 women who acknowledged experiencing a distressing event indicated they had visited a health care professional within 12 months to discuss their ordeal. Of the women who visited a General Practitioner to discuss the distress, supportive listening was considered the main help given. Supportive listening was associated with the time given, high level of inter­ personal skills, and the health practitioner’s level of interest. On the other hand, approximately 20% of women reported their physician did not engage in effective listening, demonstrated by lack of interest and being rushed through the consultation. This study highlights the need to improve listening skills, demonstrate health practitioner presence/availability, listen with interest, and allow time (Outram et al., 2004). Dickson et al. (2017) agree, citing patient dis­ satisfaction as being directly related to being unable to discuss problems, being discouraged from asking questions, and limited consultation time available with practitioners. Connectedness, initiated by engagement, is described by McCormack and Johnson (2001) as the starting point for patient‐centered care and autonomy. Patients engaged in conversa­ tions with their health care providers reportedly play a more active role in their health care (Henry, Fuhrel‐Forbis, Rogers, & Eggly 2012). Research suggests that when health practi­ tioners listen to patients and families, the level of engagement increases, and there is better compliance with treatments (thereby influencing treatment results), programs, and preventive activities; there also is more notable success of interventions (King et al., 2016). When active listening behaviors are demonstrated by health care providers, patients adhere more readily to prescribed health care regimes, have improved recall of health educational material, and are more motivated for health‐related behavior change (Davis, Foley et al., 2008; West et  al., 2018). One such example is motivational interviewing (MI; Miller & Rollnick, 2012). Initially and extensively used in the addiction field, MI is now used widely across areas of health care addressing health‐related behavior change (Rollnick, Butler, Kinnersley, Gregory, & Mash, 2010; Lundahl, Kunz, Brownell, Tollefson, & Burke, 2010). Active listening plays an important part in MI techniques allowing for person‐centered approaches and leading ­clients to develop self‐motivation, self‐efficacy, and autonomy with the aim of behavior change (Lundahl et  al., 2010; Rollnick et  al., 2010). Widely recognized as directly linked to quality of care, engagement in one’s own health care, and improved patient satisfaction outcomes (West et al., 2018), listening is also credited with health practitioners being less vulnerable to malpractice outcomes and making fewer treatment mistakes (Bendapudi et al., 2006). Where effective listening is used, measurable improvements in emotional health, functional status, and changes in physiological measures are reported (Davis, Thompson et  al., 2008;



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Kaplan, Greenfield, & Ware, 1989). Spending time listening to patients in itself has therapeutic effects (Dickson et  al., 2017). For example, effective listening behaviors help reduce patient stress and are believed to aid in healing (van Dulmen, 2017). Indeed, if listening builds trust and rapport, then the more time spent on listening may not only improve the breadth and quality of provider‐patient relationships, it may also lead patients to share vital information that otherwise would not be disclosed. As Jagosh and colleagues (2011) argued, health p ­ rofessionals should seek to learn about the whole person, not just medical diagnoses and issues they are presented with; otherwise, patients may just tell their providers what they think they want to hear. This is especially important given that patients and family members will sometimes present with physical problems initially, hoping the health professional will recognize their emotional needs. When, however, time constraints intrude on consultations, there is a risk that patients will discuss only their illness/condition as the basis for their appointment (e.g. a prescription for antidepressants), and important pieces of information (via the person’s life story and lived experiences) that lend themselves to finding therapeutic options (e.g. family distress) will be missed or overlooked (Outram et al., 2004). This does not mean that patients require long appointment times. In fact, competent listeners, who are present and focused on their patients, may actually elicit information more efficiently and effectively. The result? Extended length of consultation times may not be needed, and future consultations may be reduced (Ferenchick, Simpson, Blackman, DaRosa & Dunnington, 1997). Covey (2013) suggested the vast majority of people do not listen with the intent to under­ stand; rather, they listen with the intention to reply. Thus, health professionals need to slow the pace of interactions with patients. Immediately responding to information provided may lead to patients feeling they have not been heard, or that the practitioner is not understanding how they feel. The issue is twofold: People will not listen themselves if they feel they are not being listened to, and people repeat themselves when they do not feel heard (Sallinen, Kukkurainen & Peltokallio, 2011). Van Dulmen (2017) suggested that lack of effective reciprocal information exchange and the need to repeat oneself are responsible for multiple and repeat visits to health providers, as well as the desire for second opinions, disengagement from therapeutic interventions, and poorer patient outcomes. Given the importance of listening to health care, it is paramount to understand exactly what constitutes “good” (or competent) listening. First, good listeners are aware of potential biases and barriers that may impede their listening, and they pay attention to their listening behaviors (Davis, Thompson et al. 2008). They read the context and listen between the lines for patients’ innermost worries, while simultaneously demonstrating a genuine desire to understand. Competent listeners utilize strategies to employ receptive, exploratory, supportive, and critical listening skills with patients, families, caregivers, and other health professionals (Foster et al., 2012). They recognize that listening is a fundamental communication skill to be utilized in the unique task of delivering bad news (Malloy, Virani, Kelly, & Munevar, 2010) as well as a way to check patients’ (and family members’) understandings and demonstrate empathy (Monden, Gentry, Cox, & Baylor, 2016). In terms of specific behaviors, Davis, Thompson and colleagues (2008) listed the following as central to effective listening skills: ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●●

Maintaining eye contact. Giving full attention both mentally and physically. Reducing barriers. Avoiding interruptions. Responding to the content and feeling of the message. Listening for ideas and themes. Conveying that the message is understood. Responding to the message, both verbal and nonverbal aspects.

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Employing such techniques ensures the art and science of listening is an effective commu­ nication tool used wisely to improve quality of care, participation in therapeutic interventions, and patients’ engagement in their health care.

Listening in Clinical Environments Clinical health care settings are busy and noisy environments, with buzzers, alarms, phones, intercom systems, pagers, and conversations being just a few of the origins of hospital‐based noise (Choiniere, 2010). Health professionals must filter out myriad sounds within the envi­ ronment and know how and when to respond quickly and appropriately. Distractions ema­ nating from the environment have potential to interfere with effective communication, including listening, and potentially increase risk of error, negatively impacting patient safety (AORN, 2014; Brown, Rutherford & Crawford, 2015). We briefly touch on three areas that have important listening implications in clinical settings: situation awareness, clinical hand­ overs, and auscultation.

Situation Awareness Situation awareness refers to one’s ability to manage the interplay of different stimuli and focus effective listening. Recent work has begun to examine the concept of situation awareness in health care, particularly nursing, where attention to the environment surrounding the patient impacts listening and influences patient care errors. According to Sitterding and colleagues (2012), current health care delivery “requires a constant state of attention to the unexpected, with the capacity to perceive multiple points of data, conditions, and disparate decision ­making” (p. 77). Other research centering on undergraduate nursing students found that situation awareness was negatively impacted in simulations where patients’ conditions deterio­ rated (McKenna et al., 2014). While studies support claims that situational awareness is linked to poorer health professional–patient communication and greater clinical error, additional research is needed to support this notion. Furthermore, the role of effective listening in the context of situation awareness in health care specifically requires further exploration.

Clinical Handovers Clinical handover, where information is communicated from one health professional to another, requires well‐developed listening skills for optimal patient outcomes (Eggins & Slade, 2015). In acute health care settings, health professionals pass patient care to others who have specific skills and knowledge to manage their particular clinical conditions (Marmor & Li, 2017). For example, nurses work in shifts and need to hand over patient care to those coming on the next shift, phy­ sicians may need to hand over patient care to surgeons, or paramedics may hand over patients to emergency room nurses. Effective communication and listening are essential to delivering cru­ cial information, continuity of appropriate care, and patient safety (Pezzolesi et al., 2012). Clinical handover, however, is complex and at significant risk of miscommunication. It can be informal or formal, and conducted in a range of places, including patient’s bedside, ward desk, or meeting room. Effective clinical handover relies on accurate information transfer and proficient communication skills. When communication errors occur, patient safety and care may be compromised (Slade et  al., 2016). Many contextual factors may impact handover effectiveness, including interruptions that impact hearing and listening within the noisy clinical setting, insufficient available time or preparation, and cultural diversity among health profes­ sionals (Slade et al., 2016).



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While communication skills have been examined in the context of clinical handover, listening as a specific skill has not. There is a need for further research to enhance understanding into optimizing effective listening in this specialized area.

Auscultation Specific and refined listening skills are also required for particular tasks, such as auscultation, a key skill in physical health assessment performed by many health professionals, including doc­ tors, nurses, and paramedics. The most common way patients experience this process is when health providers use stethoscopes in health assessments. Clinicians must differentiate distinct sounds when assessing blood pressure as well as the status of internal organs such as lungs, heart, and bowel to assess function (Collins, Vanderheide, & McKenna, 2014; Pellico, Duffy, Fennie, & Swan, 2012). Auscultation accuracy is, therefore, crucial to effective diagnosis. How health care providers acquire the ability to discern distinct sounds in learning ausculta­ tion, however, remains poorly understood. Acoustic and aural awareness training has been proposed as one means for facilitating skills development (Collins et al., 2014). Pellico and colleagues (2012) implemented music auditory training with graduate entry nursing students to examine its impact on students’ abilities to detect various heart, lung, and bowel sounds, finding interpretation improved by 50%. Music education has also been used to develop nursing students’ abilities to distinguish sounds (Collins et al., 2014). Students participating in activities reported improved auscultation skills and enhanced abilities at recognizing patient and staff aural overload. As with situation aware­ ness and clinical handovers, however, research on auscultation remains scant, and more work is needed on the training and development of auscultation skills.

Challenges to Effective Listening in Health Care Imagine meeting a person for the first time. The level of vulnerability and trepidation felt can either be exacerbated or elevated based on that first contact. For patients, this emotional response is heightened. Patients within a health care setting are nearly always vulnerable, at‐risk, or special in some way (Cournoyer, 2004). They may have received a diagnosis they are strug­ gling to fully comprehend (e.g., a parent who has been told that her new child has a range of complex needs). A health professional’s ability to listen and respond can be a turning point for these patients. When patients and their family members are at their most vulnerable, core listening skills become important in establishing working relationships. At such times, listening needs to be both a physical orientation and style of responding. Attentive behavior has been shown to be one of the most effective ways to engage the most vulnerable patient (O’Hara & Pocket, 2013). Egan (2013) encouraged health professionals to use the SOLER model: focus Squarely on what the client is saying, remaining Open in presen­ tation and questioning style, demonstrating listening by Leaning towards the client, if culturally appropriate, maintaining Eye contact and keeping the environment as Relaxed as possible. Even when using this evidence‐based approach, responses from patients, in this context, can also create anxiety and vulnerability for health professionals. In these instances, health workers’ abilities to use effective listening skills can be challenged. The aching sense of loss‐grief, con­ fusion, and emptiness that patients and family members can feel and overtly exhibit, may spark a cord with workers. It is in these deepest moments of connections that use of silence can assist in ensuring effective listening is not compromised. Deep emotional processing takes time, and it is therefore important to reflect back to patients what is being heard, in as close to the patient’s own words as possible, ensuring that the practitioner’s own responses are minimized.

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As Mearns and Cooper (2018) noted, “listening to patients…involves more that providing them with an opportunity to talk” (p. 146), it means actively and genuinely attending to the patient and their family members. When clinicians struggle with patient vulnerability, they may engage in premature reflection on early feelings that may be more a reflection of their own response, than of the patient’s feelings. In such situations, nonverbal cues form an important component of the listening process, as they provide insight into the patient’s emotional state. Nonverbal clues also indicate how an interview should progress. Through observations and responses to nonverbal cues, health pro­ fessionals can demonstrate listening and attending behaviors towards patients: Reflecting on patients’ communication through use of minimal responses, using encouragers to facilitate further conversation, being mindful of both the professional’s and patient’s non‐verbal behavior, considering tone of voice, and remembering that silence can further demonstrate a sense that professionals are listening effectively to patients (Geldard & Geldard, 2009).

Empathic Listening in Health Care The health professional’s ability to listen empathically is recognized as a key cognitive and psychological attribute for establishing rapport with patients and families as well as forming therapeutic relationships (Brown et al., 2010). This relationship is particularly significant in health care settings where medical, nursing, and allied health practitioners are in privileged positions of having patients and family members share feelings, fears, needs, views, and condi­ tions they may not divulge to anyone else. The empathic health care professional who actively listens to patients’ stories and concerns is associated with improvements in many aspects of clinical and therapeutic care, including higher rates of patient compliance and satisfaction, enhanced medical history taking, more active engagement of patients and family members in the health provision process, and better treatment outcomes (Ahrens, Ciechanowski & Katon, 2012; Hojat et al., 2011). It is important, however, to differentiate between empathic and sympathetic behaviors. Empathic listening operates at a much deeper level compared to sympathetic listening. The emotionally intelligent health professional seeks to fully understand patient experiences and communicate that understanding (Chen, Kirshenbaum, Yan, Kirshenbaum, & Aseltine, 2012). The sympathetic doctor, nurse, or therapist, on the other hand, may well care about the patient’s suffering, but by demonstrating sympathy alone (without empathy) and responding on a superficial emotional level to the patient’s story, health professionals risk not getting the full pic­ ture of patients’ clinical situations which can interfere with clinical objectivity. Empathic listening is the active and emotional involvement of a listener and consists of sensing emotional needs of a patient, processing what has been said, and responding using verbal and non‐verbal responses to indicate active attention (Bodie, Gearhart, Denham, & Vickery, 2013; see also Jones & Mulawa, this volume). It also involves communicating understanding and intention to provide care to patients and families (Fields et al., 2011). Whether interactions take place in the doctor’s surgery, psychologist’s office, with a nurse at a sexual health clinic, or during an occupational therapist’s home visit, clinical or therapeutic outcomes are often dependent on empathic respon­ siveness of health professionals (Myers, 2000). In health care settings where illness, pain, and treatment are often “triggers” for feelings of fear, powerlessness, and distress in patients, this can represent particular challenges for health professionals (Maunder & Hunter, 2012). In the context of time‐limited interviews and consultations, health care professionals may feel under pressure to take fast, concise, standardized histories. In other words, the practi­ tioner elicits bare essential information in relation to patients’ medical and social details while maintaining a distant, objective, disconnected, emotional distance from the patient and their family (Eggins & Slade, 2015; Greenstein et al., 2013; Jagosh et al., 2011). It is vital, however,



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for clinicians to maintain natural curiosity about patients’ lives; to focus on actively listening to their concerns, perspectives, and stories to establish an empathic bond. Patients are typically interrupted in less than 90 seconds of a clinical interview (Halpern, 2003). Giving space to talk encourages trust and disclosure and allows the practitioner to listen and observe verbal and non‐verbal cues. Acknowledging difficult and often painful ­situations by using statements such as “I sense your pain,” “I understand this is hard to speak about,” “How do you feel talking about that?” or “Is there anything more you want to add?” encourages people to elaborate on their concerns. These types of responses also facilitate positive connections with patients and significant others, who will feel understood, respected, and validated, with added benefits of more accurate diagnoses and increased treatment com­ pliance (Nunes, Williams, Sa & Stevenson, 2011). Empathic listening does not mean telling patients how they should respond. Rather, the aim is to provide patients and family members with freedom and space to express fears and con­ cerns (Itzchakov, DeMarree, Kluger, & Turjeman‐Levi, 2018). This allows them independence to come to terms with diagnoses, treatment options, decision making, and potential outcomes of illness (Serbin, 2013). Adopting a non‐directive approach builds necessary trust for patients to follow medical and therapeutic advice. For example, empathic listening by health profes­ sionals has been associated with maintenance of positive health behaviors (Ahrens et al., 2012), improved diabetes and weight control (Hojat et al., 2011; Weiner et al., 2013), and higher patient satisfaction rates (Menendez, Chen, Mudgal, Jupiter, & Ring, 2015; for review, see Derksen, Bensing, & Lagro‐Janssen, 2012). It is important, however, for health professionals to maintain clinical detachment (i.e., avoid intense emotional involvement) (Austen, 2016) and to feel secure in their patient interactions by maintaining professional boundaries that support rapport, trust, and meaningful sharing of information (Weilenmann et al., 2018). Kerasidou and Horn (2016) assert that physicians use emotional detachment as a way “to maintain scientific and medical objectivity when dealing with distressing situations [and]…allows physicians to remain composed when faced with emotionally difficult situations, and guide and support the patient through it” (p. 2). They noted that health professionals need “to retain an emotional detachment to protect themselves from stressful situations they face in their daily work” (p. 2). Empathy has been proposed as one means to achieve balance between emotional detachment and emotional over‐involve­ ment in the health environment during exchanges between patients, their families, and health providers (Austen, 2016). The practitioner who listens with empathy and applies perspective‐ taking legitimizes the patient’s reaction and provides them with opportunity needed to express themselves (Gearhart & Bodie, 2011). This establishes an important emotional connection that supports the treatment management process, while maintaining appropriate boundaries and healthy separation between themselves and the patient (Serbin, 2013).

Conclusion Listening in health care is multifaceted and complex. In establishing, maintaining, and fos­ tering trusting, caring relationships between health care professionals, patients and families, effective listening is essential. This chapter has covered four key related topics. Firstly, the importance of effective listening as the basis for providing effective care for patients and fam­ ilies was considered. Second, situation awareness, clinical handover, and auscultation as three specific aspects of listening in the clinical environment were highlighted. Thirdly, challenges to effective listening specific to health care were discussed. Finally, aspects of empathic listening amongst health care professionals were examined. Several recommendations for future research relative to listening in health care include: (i) how listening skills in health professional students develop and evolve during their

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e­ ducation; (ii) exploring when and how different types of listening skills are used in different types of health care contexts; (iii) determining different kinds of listening skills (e.g., including active, empathetic, engaging, analytical, inquiring, evaluative, critical, and ­discerning) used most often by different health professionals; and (iv) determining from patients’ and families’ ­ perspectives, features of effective listening that health care pro­ fessionals need to actively ­demonstrate to provide high quality care.

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Listening for Healthy Democracy Jim Macnamara

Voice has been identified and widely discussed as an essential component of a viable and ­equitable public sphere in democratic societies, which in one form or another, now exist in around 200 countries worldwide (Marsh & Miller, 2012, p. 3). Voice in a democratic political context is interrelated with the fundamental democratic concept of participation, as well as the psychological concept of engagement. Apart from those who become directly involved in politics as “political actors” (e.g., electoral representatives, party officials, and journalists), ­participation for most citizens involves the right and opportunity to express their voice and, implicitly, for collective voice to be given consideration in policy and decision making. Participation, according to academic literature (e.g., Arnstein, 1969) and organizations such as the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2, 2016), requires consultation, involvement, collaboration with, and empowerment of those affected by policies and decisions. Therefore, voice in this context is more than speaking. With public trust in politics and government declining, alarmingly in many countries (Edelman, 2018; Harvard, 2015), and recent landmark uprisings of public frustration with government and mainstream politics, such as Brexit in the UK and the shock election of Donald Trump, it is timely – even essential – to review these concepts. This chapter draws on a number of recent research studies, as well as democratic political and communication theory, to discuss an under‐theorized and under‐practiced central concept of democracy that is necessary to make voice, engagement, and participation meaningful and effective – namely, listening. In particular, this chapter explores organizational listening as an important extension of interpersonal listening. While interpersonal listening justifiably receives considerable academic attention, organizational listening is rarely discussed. How organizations can and should listen, and why this is an important topic for theory and practice, warrants urgent and close attention in contemporary democratic societies.

Voice and “Speaking Up” From the earliest forms of democracy in ancient Greece and Rome, vox populi – the voice of the people (the demos) – has been recognized as fundamental to democracy, and its potential to influence and shape the policies and decisions of government and the exercise of power and The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

386 Macnamara authority (the krátos) is undeniable. This early emphasis on “voice” led to rhetoric, the art of speaking persuasively, becoming one of the foundational liberal arts. Indeed, based on the writings and oratory of the Sophists, Plato, and Aristotle in ancient Greece; Cicero and Quintilian in Rome; and others (Atwill, 1998), rhetoric remains one of the major traditions of human communication scholarship (Craig & Muller, 2007; Littlejohn, Foss & Oetzel, 2017). It is instructive, however, that for much of the twentieth century and even into the twenty‐first century, human communication has been widely studied as speech communication (Cohen, 1994; Gunn & Dance, 2014). In the wake of numerous expressions of concern about a “democratic deficit” (Couldry, 2010, p. 49; Curran, 2011, p. 86; Norris, 2011), Dobson pointed out in his 2014 book, Listening for Democracy, that efforts to improve democracy have mainly focused on “getting more people to speak” (p. 36). In studying marginalized communities, Dreher (2009) similarly concluded that “in much research and advocacy, there is a strong emphasis on the democratic potential of voice, representation, speaking up and talking” (p. 446) [emphasis added]. Even in the age of interactive social media that, hypothetically, increase two‐way ­communicative interaction, Crawford (2009) has noted that “speaking up has become the dominant metaphor for participation in online spaces,” while “listening is not a common ­metaphor for online activity” (p. 526). In contemporary democracies, governments routinely invite citizens to “speak up” and “have your say” in public forums and online. For example, in America the “Speak Up” campaign encourages young people to speak up about violence (Speak Up, n.d.). Similarly, the UK parliament calls on citizens to “have your say” on laws and legislation (Have Your Say: Laws, n.d.). The Twitter hashtag #Speakup invites people to express their views on a range of issues, while special issue sites such as #MeToo give voice to victims of sexual harassment. Media organizations also invite their viewers, listeners, and readers to “have your say.” For  ­instance, the BBC produces a weekly discussion‐based television program titled “Have Your Say,” which is broadcast internationally on BBC World News and BBC World Service radio (Have Your Say, n.d.). A Google search of the phrases “speak up” and “have your say” at the time of this writing yielded 4.85 billion listings, ranging from local councils and authorities to national governments and multinational corporations. This compared with 1.55 billion references to “listen up” – and many of these related to the American TV series of that name and the song by UK band Oasis. Encouragingly, however, the “Listen First” Project founded in America in 2013 (http://www.listenfirstproject.org) had a similar number of mentions (1.52 billion). Based on these examples, one might conclude that we are living in a halcyon period of democracy beyond what the ancient Greeks ever imagined. There is no shortage of invitations to express voice and speak, and much talk about listening. With open access social media, there are more opportunities than ever before for people to speak on any issue they choose – and potentially to listen. However, this chapter identifies and examines a debilitating gap in public communication, particularly in relation to communicating with organizations that play a central role in contemporary societies.

Listening: The Essential Corollary of Voice and Speaking Couldry (2009) defined voice as “the implicitly linked practices of speaking and listening” (p. 580). The term “implicitly” hints at the gap to be explored. In his major sociological work on voice, Why Voice Matters, Couldry (2010) called for “new intensities of listening” (p. 140) to provide voice that “matters.” Furthermore, voice and speaking must be examined within the context of human communication theory, which explicitly informs us that communication involves “talking and listening” (Craig, 2006, p. 39). While a one‐way transmissional notion of



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communication remains common, communication is defined as a two‐way transactional process involving sharing and exchange of meaning (Carey, 1989; Craig, 2006; Littlejohn, et al., 2017). Reception theory (Morley, 1980), audience studies (Abercrombie & Longhurst, 1998), and the broad field of communication and media effects have brought increased attention to the ­reception, processing, and interpretation of information and messages vis‐à‐vis transmitting messages, which was the focus of early communication models (Berlo, 1960). Bickford (1996), in her landmark text The Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conflict and Citizenship, was among the first to identify a problem in relation to listening in democratic politics. Couldry (2009) later described the paradox “that voice can apparently be offered, without any attention to whether it is matched by processes for listening,” arguing that it is “part of the banal oxymoron of neoliberal democracy” (p. 581). Couldry (2010) also observed that in the public sphere and society generally “surprisingly, little attention has been given to what listening involves” (p. 146). More recently, Dobson (2014) declared that “honourable exceptions aside, virtually no attention has been paid to listening in mainstream political ­science” (p. 36). Why this lack of attention? Historically, the focus of listening researchers and the object of their studies has emphasized aural listening and interpersonal contexts. For example, Lipari (2010) acknowledged that listening is studied in “humanities‐based communication scholarship” as well as in “social science and cognitive science literature,” predominantly in the context of interpersonal listening (p. 351). In their 2014 review of listening‐related literature, Bodie and Crick (2014) issued a call “to lift listening from its slumber in Western scholastic thinking and in the communication studies discipline more specifically” (p. 118). Such a project, one is pleased to report, is well underway in terms of interpersonal listening through major texts such as the edited volume, The  Sourcebook of Listening Research: Methodology and Measures (Worthington & Bodie, 2017), the International Journal of Listening, and handbooks such as this. However, in contemporary industrialized and post‐industrial societies, citizens not only interact with other individuals and small groups, but also with organizations. As Bimber, Flanagin, and Stohl (2012) identified, organizations play a central role in contemporary ­societies. In complex organized societies, citizens engage with government departments and agencies; corporations; institutions such as the Church, police, hospitals and the health system, the legal system, and the military; and a plethora of non‐government organizations (NGOs) and non‐profit organizations on a daily basis. Organizations make and regulate laws, provide services, produce and sell products; protect, monitor, and surveil; all of which significantly affect the lives of citizens and communities.

Organizational Listening A fully functioning democracy and society requires organizations to listen to people, whether they are conceptualized as citizens, voters, constituents, or as customers, members, employees, residents, students, patients, or as “consumers” in neoliberal terms. Here, for simplicity, the single term “stakeholders” will be used to denote those who are affected by the policies and activities of organizations (Freeman, 1984). While it is people inside organizations, including employees in roles such as customer relations and managers, who ultimately listen (or don’t listen) to stakeholders, listening in and by organizations needs to extend beyond interpersonal listening because of three key features that influence much organization–public communication: scale, distance, and time. In terms of scale, organizations – whether government departments or agencies, large NGOs, or national and international corporations – need to communicate with thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of people, which requires “scaling up” listening techniques and

388 Macnamara practices (Dobson, 2014, pp. 75, 124). Interpersonal discussions, whether one‐to‐one or in small groups, are a limited form of engagement and participation that become impractical when there are large numbers of stakeholders exercising voice. Likewise, individual human reading of written communication becomes impractical when documents run into the thousands or even hundreds of thousands, as can occur in public inquiries and large‐scale public consultations. Distance is also a key factor in organizational listening because stakeholders do not always live close to organizations that affect their lives. Even local governments may be beyond the physical reach of stakeholders who lack transportation to attend meetings or public forums. Distance between organizations and their stakeholders is also affected by factors such as Internet access and digital literacy, which can create virtual distance and contribute to the “digital divide.” Time is a key factor in organization–stakeholder communication in two respects. First, physical distance between stakeholders and organizations that affect their lives means that direct, real‐time communication with relevant organization representatives is often impossible. Second, time is a key factor in that, while organizations have resources such as policy advisers, lawyers, professional lobbyists, public relations specialists, and other staff to expeditiously and effectively express their voices, many stakeholders such as individual citizens and even small community groups often do not have the time to prepare submissions, letters, or reports which are required for distanciated voice. These factors lead to three key characteristics of organizational listening that shape its processes, modes, and effectiveness, as follows. 1. Organizational listening is largely delegated through a range of organizational functions. These include social and market research, customer relations, public consultation, stakeholder engagement, complaints handling, correspondence processing and, increasingly in the digital age, social media monitoring and analysis. 2. Organizational listening is mostly mediated. Information and feedback are received by organizations mostly through written communication such as e‐mails, letters, submissions, reports, responses to surveys, inquiries, and comments posted on websites, posts in social media, or through recorded telephone calls to call centers. 3. Organizational listening is therefore predominantly asynchronous. Therefore, unlike interpersonal listening which is direct, face‐to‐face, and synchronous, organizational listening requires and depends on systems, structures, resources, and a range of processes, technologies, and specialist skills that can enable and facilitate delegated, mediated, large‐scale listening (see also Bond, this volume). Before examining the elements required for effective organizational listening in more detail, it is important to have a clear and consistent understanding of what constitutes listening. Listening is not the same thing as hearing, a term often incorrectly used as a synonym (Lipari, 2010; Macnamara, 2016). Whereas hearing starts and ends with the reception of signals or information, listening requires further processes. As Couldry (2010) said in relation to democratic societies: “The issue is what governments do with voice, once expressed: are they prepared to change the way they make policy?” (p. 146). Rosanvallon (2008) argued that what contemporary democracies lack are not opportunities for citizens to express their views, but the means by which those voices can be valued within processes of policy development (p. 13). This is not to suggest that listening requires agreement or compliance with what is said in all circumstances. Drawing on a range of literature in relation to communication, listening, ethics, and democratic politics, studies have identified at least seven key principles or components of listening, as follows: 1. Recognition of others as having a right to speak (Honneth, 2007; Husband, 2009). 2. Being open to what others say (Gadamer, 1989 [1960]). 3. Acknowledgment of others’ views and expressions of voice, ideally in a timely way (Klein, 2007; Macnamara, 2016, p. 41).

4. 5. 6. 7.

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Paying attention to what is said (Bickford, 1996; Husband, 2009, p. 441; Honneth, 2007). Trying to understand others’ views and perspectives (Husband, 1996, 2000). Giving consideration to what is said. Responding in an appropriate way (Lundsteen, 1979; Purdy & Borisoff 1997, p. 6). Response may involve explaining why a request cannot be met, provided it is legitimate and authentic.

Research into Organizational Listening Despite corporate and government communication and public relations theories describing these fields of practice as two‐way communication (Fairbanks, Plowman, & Rawlins, 2007; Grunig, Grunig, & Dozier, 2002), recent research illustrates a major imbalance in organizational speaking versus listening to their stakeholders. A study of 36 government, non‐ government, and corporate organizations in Australia, the UK, and America, using a variety of methods, including ethnography, interviews, and content analysis of relevant documents, found that, on average, 80% of communication‐related resources were devoted to disseminating organizational messages (i.e., speaking). In some instances, up to 95% of their investment in public communication was devoted to speaking (Macnamara, 2016, p. 235). Thus, as little as 5% of the total investment in public communication by the organizations studied focused on listening to their stakeholders. Furthermore, when organizations did listen, it was primarily instrumental in nature, undertaken to gain information that the organization wants, such as “intelligence” and “insights” to aid the “targeting” of communication campaigns to gain support for policies or influence voting in elections (p. 236). The lack of adequate and effective listening by organizations that play important roles in society represents a major failing in public communication practice. This lack of listening is contributing to democratic decline, falling public trust, and social inequity (Macnamara, 2016, 2017). The problem cannot be explained away or dismissed as a lack of resources, given that investment by organizations in public communication is substantial and growing. Advertising expenditure – mostly undertaken by large organizations including government departments and agencies – exceeded US$550 billion in 2018 (Statista, 2018). Public relations is ­reportedly growing by 15% a year or more (USC Annenberg, 2018). Also, potential sites of organizational listening such as social and market research, public consultation, complaints processing, call centers, correspondence, and social media engagement (see Macnamara, 2016) are major functional units in contemporary corporate and government organizations. These findings supported my conclusion that, in the name of public communication, organizations create an “architecture of speaking” operationalized through advertising, media publicity, publications, events, websites, presentations, speeches, and other rhetorical strategies (Macnamara, 2016, p. 235). An analysis of UK government communication following the referendum that led to Brexit provided additional support for this claim. This 2016–2017 study found that a major focus of government communication was “campaigns” designed to influence citizens in accordance with the government’s objectives. Thus, there was again an emphasis on organizational speaking. Furthermore, this study found a number of specific breakdowns and failures in terms of organizations listening to stakeholder groups and citizens. These included the following: ●●

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Public consultations were often conducted simply to meet regulatory requirements, thus becoming “box ticking” exercises, with no significant influence on policy or decisions. Public consultations and inquiries mainly received submissions from “the usual suspects” such as professional organizations, industry lobbyists, and activists. Many, if not most, citizens lack the time and the skills to write formal submissions, which often require supporting research data and formal presentation styles and language.

390 Macnamara ●●

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There was a lack of outreach to marginalized communities and silent majorities (e.g., visiting affected areas, convening public meetings, or interviewing in local communities) (see Dutta & Elers, this volume). Like corporate management, politicians and government policy advisers relied predominantly on quantitative data gained through surveys and polling and failed to gain deep insights through qualitative research. They also often failed to recognize text such as written submissions to consultations and correspondence as data, even though the voice of stakeholders and citizens is expressed more fully in words than in numbers. Submissions to consultations and correspondence were not systematically analyzed in most cases due to lack of time and a lack of content analysis or textual analysis software applications. Instead, manual cursory reading is undertaken in most instances. Social media were mainly used for speaking (i.e., disseminating government information and messages), rather than listening, despite being two‐way communication channels with a focus on sociality. Communication staff lacked key listening‐related skills (i.e., conducting content or textual analysis or using advanced research) and engagement methods (i.e., deliberative polling, behavioral insights, participatory action research, or appreciative inquiry). A lack of data integration often prevented the sharing of data and feedback across government departments and agencies. Findings from research, consultation submissions, correspondence, and other stakeholder feedback commonly remained in “data silos,” effectively silencing the voices of those who speak up and speak out.

In addition to the identified gap in theory in relation to how organizations including governments in democratic societies listen, these studies show an alarming lack of listening in practice, which denies meaningful voice to stakeholders  –  or what Couldry (2010) called “voice that matters.”

Towards Meaningful Engagement and Democratic Participation On the positive side, these studies and others help identify ways that the voice of stakeholders can be made meaningful and made to matter in complex organized societies. It is simplistic to conclude that government officials and elected political representations do not want to listen, or that they conspire to ignore those who they represent or serve. Rather, detailed analysis of the research studies discussed identifies three important steps to inform both theory and practice in democratic political communication.

An “Architecture of Listening” A logical counter‐balance to the one‐way skew in communication and the devaluing of voice (i.e., an architecture of speaking) is for an organization to develop an architecture of listening. An architecture is proposed, rather than a single solution, because research shows that a number of inter‐related elements are required for organizational listening. Occasional “listening tours” or relying on a technological solution such as digital engagement and social media listening (Coleman & Blumler, 2009, p. 146) will not address the substantial listening deficit. Drawing from political communication, listening, and ethics literature, eight elements of an architecture of listening can be identified as follows: 1. An organizational culture that is open to listening (Gadamer, 1989; Honneth, 2007; Husband, 1996, 2009) – that is, one that inclusively recognizes others’ right to speak, pays attention to them, tries to understand their views – even when they are divergent or oppositional, and responds with acknowledgment and respect.



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2. Addressing the politics of listening (e.g., avoiding selective listening and addressing power differentials) (Bassel, 2017; Dreher, 2009). 3. Policies that specify and require listening to ensure commitment of resources and energy. 4. Systems that are open and interactive, such as websites that allow visitors to post comments and questions, vote on issues, and so on. 5. Technologies to aid listening, such as monitoring tools or services for tracking media and online comment, automated acknowledgment systems, text analysis software for sense‐ making, and even specialist argumentation software to facilitate meaningful consultation, deliberation, and debate. 6. Resources including staff to operate listening systems and do the “work of listening,” such as establishing forums and consultations, inviting comment, and monitoring, analyzing, and responding to comments and questions (see “The Work of Listening” section). 7. Skills for operating listening systems (see the “Listening Systems” section). 8. Articulation of the voices of stakeholders and publics to policy‐making and decision‐­making. While listening does not imply or require agreement in all cases, unless there is a link to policy‐making and decision‐making for consideration of what is said to an organization, voice has no value, it does not matter (see Couldry, 2010). The concept of an architecture of listening in organizations parallels Van Lengen’s call in this handbook for an architecture to inform the design of listening spaces for interpersonal communication, giving attention to issues such as acoustics. The acoustics of organizational listening include its culture, policies, and politics, which either provide spaces for effective listening to stakeholders or deny such engagement and participation.

Listening Systems The principles of organizational listening outlined previously, such as acknowledgment, and the architecture of listening proposed, which requires monitoring and analysis of expressions of voice, mean that large organizations need effective listening systems. These are required to supplement interpersonal communication and aid human interpretation of the large volume of information and feedback received in the form of structured and unstructured data. For example, fast acknowledgment of large numbers of submissions to consultations as well as correspondence can be auto‐generated via e‐mail systems. Content and textual analysis applications using machine learning can ensure that important messages and patterns are identified in large volumes of text such as submissions, correspondence, and transcripts. Furthermore, voice to text (VTT) software, combined with textual analysis tools, can enable calls to call centers and complaints departments to be analyzed to identify common concerns and themes. This is not to suggest replacement of human attention and consideration in public communication. It is, however, important to recognize the need for systems to facilitate communication that is delegated, mediated, and asynchronous. Bond’s discussion in this handbook on mediated listening and communication technology to aid listening supports this notion, albeit with the added condition that mediation and communication technologies need to be scaled up to achieve effective organizational listening. Training and development to create listening skills, as outlined by Brownell in this handbook in relation to interpersonal and small group listening, also need to be scaled up to enable organizational employees to operationalize listening in an organization.

The Work of Listening The human element involved in listening even at a large‐scale, organizational level is further recognized in that, notwithstanding some automated systems, organizations need to undertake the work of listening (Macnamara, 2016). This requires a shift in focus from the traditional priorities of government and organizational communication  –  such as writing speeches for

392 Macnamara political leaders, issuing media releases, and posting web content  –  to implementing the ­principles of listening and the elements of an architecture of listening as outlined. Despite clear failings in its listening prior to the EU referendum,1 the UK government provides an example of how the principles of organizational listening and an architecture of listening can be implemented. Post‐Brexit, the UK Government Communication Service (GCS) has introduced a number of changes addressing the research reviewed above as well as that of related studies including: 1. Hiring of two data scientists in the Cabinet Office, Whitehall, to support UK government communication through analysis of data that provide insights into stakeholders’ and ­citizens’ views, concerns and expectations. 2. Creation of a GCS Knowledge Hub as an online community for UK government communicators to share research findings, information, tools, and tips to inform communication best practice. 3. Development of a data integration platform built on the R programming language to bring together multiple data sets such as demographic, socioeconomic, and market research data by area across the UK, called the GCS Mapper. Such integrated data can aid understanding of stakeholders and communities. 4. Implementation of social media/digital listening through dedicated teams in departments and agencies with appropriate tools and training. 5. Licensing of a social media monitoring and analysis tool for use by departments and agencies (Brandwatch). 6. Licensing of a machine learning textual analysis application for analyzing large bodies of unstructured textual data. A program jointly developed by the University of Sussex and Demos, Method52, was being trialed at the time of writing. 7. Conducting a review of public consultation procedures with a view to developing a model for inclusive public consultation (UK Cabinet Office spokesperson, personal communication, June 25, 2018).

The Costs of Not Listening While a lack of listening at an interpersonal level is frustrating socially and can lead to serious ­consequences in the case of doctor–patient and other clinical interactions (see McKenna et al. this volume), it is important to recognize that a lack of listening by organizations can have even more serious consequences and costs because of the issue of scale. For example, the importance of listening effectively to complaints was starkly illustrated in the 2013 report of the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Public Inquiry into deaths in UK hospitals. The report concluded: Building on the report of the first inquiry, the story it tells is first and foremost of appalling suffering of many patients. This was primarily caused by a serious failure on the part of a ­provider Trust Board. It did not listen sufficiently to its patients. (Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 2013)

Even more recently, the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in London, which claimed more than 70 lives and injured many more, has been directly attributed to a “failure to listen” (Ghelani, 2017,

Based on polls, the UK Government was confident of a “remain” vote in the 2016 EU referendum. The resulting “leave” vote shocked the government and led to the resignation of the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, and more than a dozen of his ministers.

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para. 1). Warnings of inadequate fire safety standards were reportedly posted on the website of the Grenfell Action Group four years before the disaster (Ghelani, 2017, para. 5), and reports identifying the dangers of combustible cladding on buildings were submitted to the UK Parliament as early as 1999 (House of Commons, 1999).

Summary and Conclusions Listening has been rightly identified as a fundamental part of human communication, and a large body of literature addresses how listening can be effectively undertaken between individuals (dyads) and in small groups. Interpersonal listening in social as well as professional, clinical, and therapeutic contexts deserves continuing attention, given the potential problems that can occur because of a lack of effective listening. Given the central role of organizations in complex, contemporary societies, how and how well organizations listen to their stakeholders is also vitally important. Organizations are required to communicate and engage at scale, which requires listening systems as well as an open culture, policies, resources, technologies, and skills to facilitate listening. In particular, in democracies in which the voice of the people is the basis of legitimacy of government and a key mode of participation, listening by government departments and agencies needs to be better recognized and better operationalized. Four factors identified in the research cited in this chapter collectively offer a practical theory and practice advice for effective organizational listening. In summary, these are (i) the definition of listening as more than hearing, instead requiring recognition, openness, acknowledgment, attention, understanding, consideration, and response; (ii) the concept of an “architecture of listening” as outlined; (iii) the identification of effective scalable listening systems in research and case studies such as the UK GCS; and (iv) the requirement for ­organizations to undertake the work of listening. Implementation of effective organizational listening can be argued as essential and a major step towards improved organization–public relationships in the current climate of dwindling public trust in business, government, NGOs, and even non‐profit organizations (Edelman, 2018). In the case of governments in democratic societies, in particular, increased and improved listening will give value to voice and make engagement and participation meaningful. The benefits of active, effective organizational listening are potentially mutual and manifold, including increased engagement and participation by citizens leading to more equitable democratic societies; more satisfied and trusting stakeholders and citizens leading to stable governments; more informed governments with an understanding of constituents’ priorities, values and views; and improved and more widely supported policies.

References Abercrombie, N., & Longhurst, B. (1998). Audiences: A sociological theory of performance and imagination. London, UK: Sage. Arnstein, S. (1969). A ladder of citizen participation. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 35, 216–224. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944366908977225 Atwill, J. (1998). Rhetoric reclaimed: Aristotle and the liberal arts tradition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bassel, L. (2017). The politics of listening: Possibilities and challenges for democratic life. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Berlo, D. (1960). The process of communication: An introduction to theory and practice. New York: Harcourt/Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

394 Macnamara Bickford, S. (1996). The dissonance of democracy: Listening, conflict and citizenship. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bimber, B., Flanagin, A., & Stohl, C. (2012). Collective action in organizations: Interaction and ­engagement in an era of technological change. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bodie, G., & Crick, N. (2014). Listening, hearing, sensing: Three modes of being and the ­phenomenology of Charles Sanders Peirce, Communication Theory, 24, 105–123. https://doi. org/10.1111/comt.12032 Carey, J. (1989). Communication as culture: Essays on media and culture. New York: Unwin Hyman. Cohen, H. (1994). The history of speech communication: The emergence of a discipline, 1914–1945. Annandale, VA: Speech Communication Association. Coleman, S., & Blumler, J. (2009). The internet and democratic citizenship: Theory, practice and policy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Couldry, N. (2009). Commentary: Rethinking the politics of voice. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 23, 579–582. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304310903026594 Couldry, N. (2010). Why voice matters: Culture and politics after neoliberalism. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Craig, R. (2006). Communication as a practice. In G. Shepherd, G. St John, & T. Striphas (Eds.), Communication as…: Perspectives on Theory (pp. 38–49). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Craig, R., & Muller, H. (Eds.). (2007). Theorizing communication: Readings across traditions. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Crawford, K. (2009). Following you: Disciplines of listening in social media. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 23, 525–535. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304310903003270 Curran, J. (2011). Media and democracy. Abingdon, Oxon, UK: Routledge. Dobson, A. (2014). Listening for democracy: Recognition, representation, reconciliation. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Dreher, T. (2009). Listening across difference: Media and multiculturalism beyond the politics of voice. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 23, 445–458. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 10304310903015712 Edelman. (2018). Edelman trust barometer. Retrieved from https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/ aatuss191/files/2018‐10/2018_Edelman_Trust_Barometer_Global_Report_FEB.pdf Fairbanks, J., Plowman, K., & Rawlins, B. (2007). Transparency in government communication. Journal of Public Affairs, 7, 23–37. https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.245 Freeman, R. (1984). Strategic management: A stakeholder approach. London: Pitman. Gadamer, H. (1989). Truth and method (2nd ed., J. Weinsheimer & D. Marshall, Trans.). New York: Crossroad. (Original work published 1960.) Ghelani, D. (2017, June 22). Grenfell Tower: “There are only the deliberately silent, or the preferably unheard”. Media Diversified. Retrieved from https://mediadiversified.org/2017/06/22/grenfell‐ tower‐there‐are‐only‐the‐deliberately‐silent‐or‐the‐preferably‐unheard/ Grunig, L. A., Grunig, J. E., & Dozier, D. M. (2002). Excellent public relations and effective organizations: A study of communication management in three countries. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Gunn, J., & Dance, F. E. X. (2014). The silencing of speech in the late twentieth century. In P. J. Gehrke & W. M. Keith (Eds.), A century of communication studies: The unfinished conversation (pp. 64–81). New York: Routledge. Harvard University. (2015). Trust in institutions and the political process. Boston, MA: Institute of Politics. Retrieved from https://iop.harvard.edu/trust‐institutions‐and‐political‐process Have Your Say. (n.d.). BBC News. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/have_your_say Have Your Say: Laws and Debates. (n.d.). Parliament UK. Retrieved from https://www.parliament.uk/ get‐involved/have‐your‐say‐on‐laws Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. (2013). Report of the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust public inquiry. Retrieved from http://www.midstaffspublicinquiry.com/sites/default/files/report/ Executive%20summary.pdf Honneth, A. (2007). Disrespect. Cambridge. UK: Polity Press. House of Commons. (1999). Potential risk of fire spread in building via external cladding systems. London, UK: Select Committee on Environment, Transport and Regional Affairs First Report. Retrieved from https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199900/cmselect/cmenvtra/109/ 10907.htm



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Husband, C. (1996). The right to be understood: Conceiving the multi‐ethnic public sphere. Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 9, 205–215. https://doi.org/10.1080/13511610. 1996.9968484 Husband, C. (2000). Media and the public sphere in multi‐ethnic societies. In S. Cottle (Ed.), Ethnic minorities and the media (pp. 199–214). Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Husband, C. (2009). Commentary: Between listening and understanding. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 23, 441–443. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304310903026602 International Association for Public Participation. (2016). The IAP2 public participation spectrum. Retrieved from https://www.iap2.org.au/About‐Us/About‐IAP2‐Australasia‐/Spectrum Klein, M. (2007, December 31). The MIT Collaboratorium: Enabling effective large‐scale deliberation for complex problems (Working Paper 4679–08). Cambridge MA: MIT Sloan School of Management. Retrieved from https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1085295 Lipari, L. (2010). Listening otherwise: The voice of ethics. International Journal of Listening, 23, 44–59. https://doi.org/10.1080/10904010802591888 Littlejohn, S., Foss, K., & Oetzel, J. (2017). Theories of human communication (11th ed.). Long Grove, IL: Waveland. Lundsteen, S. (1979). Listening: Its impact on language and the other language arts. Urbana, IL: ERIC. Macnamara, J. (2016). Organizational listening: The missing essential in public communication. New York: Peter Lang. Macnamara, J. (2017). Creating a democracy for everyone: Strategies for increasing listening and engagement by government. London, UK and Sydney, NSW: The London School of Economics and Political Science and University of Technology Sydney. Retrieved from http://www.lse.ac.uk/media‐and‐ communications/news/2017/creating‐a‐democracy‐for‐everyone Marsh, I., & Miller, R. (2012). Democratic decline and democratic renewal: Political change in Britain, Australia and New Zealand. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Morley, D. (1980). The “nationwide” audience: Structure and decoding. London, UK: BFI. Norris, P. (2011). Democratic deficit: Critical citizens revisited. New York: Cambridge University Press. Purdy, M., & Borisoff, D. (1997). Listening in everyday life: A personal and professional approach (2nd ed.). Lanham, MA: University of America Press. Rosanvallon, P. (2008). Counter‐democracy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Statista. (2018). Global advertising spending from 2010–2018 (in billion U.S. dollars). Retrieved from https://www.statista.com/statistics/236943/global‐advertising‐spending Speak Up. Save Lives. (n.d.). The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Retrieved from http://www. speakup.com USC Annenberg Center for Public Relations. (2018). Global communications report. Los Angeles, CA: Author in partnership with Edelman and The Holmes Report. Retrieved from https://www. holmesreport.com/ranking‐and‐data/global‐communications‐report/gcr‐2018‐research Worthington, D., & Bodie, G. (Eds.). (2017). The sourcebook of listening research: Methodology and ­measures. New York: Wiley Blackwell.

PART V

Emerging Perspectives

This section highlights contemporary perspectives on listening, ones that stand to push ­scholarship forward and into the next several decades. Performative listening is presented as a way of theorizing and practicing listening as an embodied and sensory act that is constituted by and constitutive of relational, cultural, and historical configurations. The Peace chapter highlights the importance of listening to building relationships and potential to ending conflict. It illustrates the power that individuals can play in reducing regional conflicts. In Augmented Reality, the role and ability of technology to elicit social responses in shared virtual spaces is explored. In the Silence chapter, a dialogic‐dialectic model for understanding silence and listening is offered.

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Performative Listening Chris McRae

The sounds of voices, the chiming ring of a cellphone, music playing on public address speakers, a running faucet, the clatter of pans and plates coming from the nearby kitchen, the jingle of keys, the faint hum of the air conditioning system, and the intermittent clicking as I press the keys on my laptop are some of the sounds that texture my experience as I set out to write this chapter. The importance of these sounds is not so much a matter of what they are, but rather that my embodied position in the world shapes my encounter and narration of these sounds. By embodied position, I am referring to the ways the material body shapes and is shaped by cultural and individual experience. My listening to and for sounds constitutes my embodied experience of this restaurant space and is also always reflective of my position in the world. For example, the sounds I hear and narrate are possible because of my physical location in the restaurant, and my listening is also marked by the cultural positioning of my body (e.g., white, able‐bodied, middle class). The act of listening shapes the ways we relate to and know the world. Feld (2015) offered the notion of acoustemology to account for the ways knowing is relationally linked to sound. He explained, “Acoustemology joins acoustics to epistemology to investigate sounding and listening as a knowing‐in‐action: a knowing‐with and knowing through the audible” (p. 12). For example, listening to and identifying sounds that might be considered ambient at best and noise at worst, shapes the ways we come to know and make sense of the world. Thus, as listeners, we encounter a world of sounds from a cultural and embodied position that both enables and constrains our ways of listening. What sounds we notice, and the ways we describe these sounds, all point to the ways our act of listening is marked by an embodied and cultural experience of the world. In the example above, my listening includes my position and privilege as someone with an academic position with a research interest in sound, listening, and performance studies. Attending to sound and listening as meaningfully informed by the embodied and cultural position of the listener presents an opportunity for framing and practicing listening as a reflexive and ethical act. I refer to this approach as performative listening  –  an embodied ­practice of critically and reflexively engaging and learning from the world and others. Performative listening emerges from the field of performance studies, which takes performance as a central metaphor and method for understanding, engaging, and enacting culture. Performative listening is grounded in performance studies research in three ways. The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

400 McRae First, performative listening engages performance as a heuristic for explaining how culture, as a system, is created and maintained (Hamera, 2006). Second, performative listening engages theories of performance as a way of enacting dialogic engagement that works to create ethical conversation and empathy across cultural differences (Conquergood, 1985). Finally, performative listening emerges from theoretical understandings of performativity as a way of marking the political and cultural implications of individual performances. Performativity theorizes embodied performance as a way of constituting cultural identities through the repetition of “sedimented acts” (Butler, 1988, p. 523). Performative listening extends this theory of performativity to the act of listening to claim that listening is a performance that “creates realities and experiences” (McRae, 2015, p. 36). Performative listening might indicate a kind of listening practice that can be analyzed and evaluated. As outlined in the following pages, however, performative listening is conceived of as an embodied and sensory practice, which ideally promotes an ethical, reflexive, and dialogic way of encountering others. In this chapter, performative listening is offered as a means of strengthening critical and reflexive approaches to engaging others in and beyond the context of qualitative research. The broad goal of performative listening is to ethically encounter and engage others by accounting for the ways our cultural and embodied locations enable and constrain our attempts at listening across difference. I begin the chapter with a discussion of the ways performative listening enacts a relational and ethical stance. Next, the four commitments that characterize performative listening as an approach to qualitative research are introduced: A commitment to listening with curiosity, a commitment to listening with and to the body, a commitment to listening for context and location, and a commitment to listening with accountability. I conclude the chapter with a discussion of the ways performative listening offers a means for enacting a reflexive pedagogical and research practice.

Performative Listening as Relational Stance Listening is an act that constitutes relationships, identities, and communicative interaction. As Beard (2009) explained, “Listening can embed us in social relationships or replace social ­relationships altogether; in either case, it can expand or complicate our identity” (p. 15). Performative listening builds on this constitutive notion of listening by specifying a relational ethic of listening. This ethic emphasizes the pedagogical role and possibilities for the listener as a student in dialogically hearing and responding to others. It further works to reflexively account for and learn from the historical, cultural, and embodied differences of others as they are relationally produced and encountered. In order to demonstrate the ways performative listening might be enacted as a purposively reflexive and ethical approach to others, I first describe the ways this theory of listening extends conversations that engage the dialogic, disruptive, and transformative potential of performativity in performance research. In other words, performative listening is a kind of performance that is dialogic, disruptive, and potentially transformative.

Performance as Dialogic First, Madison (2006) explained dialogic performativity as an ethical aim of performance research that is “charged by a desire for a generative and embodied reciprocity, sometimes with pleasure and sometimes with pain” (p. 320). For Madison, dialogic performativity is characterized by the practice of reflexivity: “The dialogic performative requires us to think about how we are thinking about our positionality as ethnographers” (p. 322). As a reflexive act, performative listening requires that we consider how we think about our positions as listeners.



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The second feature of dialogic performativity is a commitment to the imaginary as a means of discovering and realizing alternative possibilities for being with others in the world. Central to dialogic performativity is paying attention. As Madison (2006) noted, “It is paying attention to the ‘being with’ in body‐to‐body presence with Others that makes the present realizably present” (p. 323). This explanation of dialogic performativity offers a way of theorizing listening as a performative act that works towards three interrelated goals. Specifically, performative listening pays attention to others, is reflexive, and works to realize new possibilities for interacting with and relating to others.

Performance as Disruptive Performative listening also embraces the disruptive potential of performativity. Performativity, as a theory of identity formation, marks the maintenance of normalized cultural forms. For Pollock (2007), performativity also presents an opportunity for interruption to the status quo through performances of error and failure. Through repetition, performance maintains ways of knowing and being in the world by reproducing recognizable cultural formations. However, repeated acts also are always new iterations occurring in contexts that are always changing (Warren, 2008). The theory of performative listening that I propose similarly embraces the possibility for error and disruption through listening. It is through error and disruption that we create new ways of relating to others and the world (McRae, 2012). In other words, ­performative listening is a way of theorizing listening as an act that opens a space for imagining and enacting new realties, relationships, and understandings. Specifically, performative listening presents an opportunity for disrupting our assumptions about others and our sedimented ways of being in the world by emphasizing the generative function of listening.

Performance as Transformative Finally, performative listening embraces the transformative possibilities of performance and performativity through “utopian performatives” (Dolan, 2005). Pollock (2007) recognized the potential of performance to disrupt expected or status quo ways of knowing and being in the world. Dolan’s notion of the utopian performative builds on the disruptive potential of performance and begins to indicate the transformative possibilities for realizing and enacting new ways of being in the world. Utopian performatives are transformational accomplishments that build on the revelations of disruptions and make possible alternative and hopeful reconfigurations of the present moment. The utopian performative is not merely a suggestion of what is possible, but represents those moments when transformations begin. Dolan (2005) wrote, “The very present‐tenseness of performance lets audiences imagine utopia not as some idea of future perfection that might never arrive, but as brief enactments of the possibilities of a process that starts now, in this moment at the theater” (p. 17). This explanation of utopian performatives indicates and implicates the audience in enacting these transformative moments. The audience participates in making utopian performatives. As Dolan explained, “The performatives I’m engaging here aren’t iterations of what is, but transformative doings of what if” (p. 141). Performative listening works towards these transformative moments by playing in the space and possibility of the what if. Most notably, performative listening, when enacted, asks: What if I might learn something new or different from others by listening? Theories of performativity in performance studies set the stage for theorizing listening as an embodied research practice. Performative listening works to dialogically and reflexively engage others, disrupt taken‐for‐granted ways of being and knowing, and works towards transformative possibilities. Similarly, listening provides an opportunity for engaging performativity in research by emphasizing the contextual position, embodied practice, and relational possibilities

402 McRae of the researcher. In the following section, the four commitments that characterize performative listening are introduced and the potential contributions of performative listening as a reflexive practice are outlined.

Commitments of Performative Listening Performative listening is an embodied practice of critically and reflexively engaging and learning from the world and others. As an ontological position and epistemological practice, this approach follows four commitments: A commitment to listening with curiosity, a commitment to listening with and to the body, a commitment to listening for context and location, and a commitment to listening with accountability. This use of commitments is informed by the rationale Fassett and Warren (2007) offered for their use of commitments in specifying a critical communication pedagogy: We are drawn to commitments for their sense of duty, for the way they charge us with certain tasks and remind us of certain agreed upon (and often taken‐for‐granted) assumptions; commitments remind us that we have responsibilities, promises to keep. (p. 31)

What is significant about this specification of commitments is the emphasis on the promise for action. They are less a discrete set of rules, and more a set of ideals we might strive for when engaging in performative listening. Embracing them leads us to maintain a stance of openness towards the experiences and perspectives of others. These commitments offer a set of strategies for practicing ethical and reflexive engagement across difference. The goals of each of these commitments are introduced in the following sections and a brief discussion of how they inform performative listening is presented.

Commitment # 1: Listening with Curiosity The first commitment of performative listening is a commitment to listening with curiosity. In his discussion of the moral imperatives of performance ethnography, Conquergood (1985) specified dialogical performance as “one path to genuine understanding of others” (p. 9), noting that, “This performative stance struggles to bring together different voices, world views, value systems, and beliefs so that they can have a conversation with one another” (p. 9). Performative listening honors and engages Conquergood’s notion of dialogic performance by working to enact a stance of openness and curiosity towards others. As Gadamer (1975/2004) argued: But this openness exists ultimately not only for the person to whom one listens, but rather anyone who listens is fundamentally open. Without this kind of openness to one another there is no ­genuine human relationship. Belonging together always also means being able to listen to one another. (p. 355)

One important implication of a commitment to curiosity and openness is that this way of listening engenders an engagement with others that invites the possibility for conversation and the development of new understandings. As Lipari (2009) argued, “Without listening, no ethical response can arise” (p. 47). When applied to performative listening, the commitment to listening with curiosity frames this approach to research as an opportunity to learn. Performative listening, as a qualitative research practice, emphasizes openness to others. When we engage in performative listening, we work to hear the different sounds, words, and experiences of others, acknowledging them as both valuable and instructive. This commitment



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to curiosity also presents listeners with opportunities for transformation. The question theater director Bogart (2007) posed to actors is equally relevant for those who might take up performative listening as a mode of research: “What are your intentions? Do you intend to function from the safety of what you already know, or can you welcome the experience of exposing yourself to less comfortable, more complex issues?” (pp. 35–36). Listening with curiosity is an opportunity to engage and be transformed by the experiences, perspectives, and stories of others.

Commitment # 2: Listening with and to the Body In his phenomenology of sound and voice, Ihde (2007) explained, “I do not merely hear with my ears, I hear with my whole body. My ears are at best the focal organs of hearing” (p. 44). Listening is an act that always implicates and is implicated by the body. For example, the physical positioning of our body shapes how we might listen to and hear sound. A commitment to listening with, and to, the body, includes a consideration of the range of embodied listening practices that constitute the act of listening. This includes the experience of those who may be deaf or who might engage in the act of listening from embodied positions that exceed the limits of the ear. For example, for those who are deaf, listening may not be an act that is primarily linked to a hearing ear, but instead listening is activated by a range of sensory modes of engagement. Listening with and to the body in qualitative research is therefore a question of reflexively attending to the way listening emerges from our unique embodied position. Musicologist Eidsheim (2015) presented a rethinking of music that helps clarify the embodied significance of listening. For Eidsheim, a consideration of music and singing as defined by sound is a reduction that fails to account for the full scope of the music making event. She writes, “I suggest that if we reframe musicking’s core, understanding it as a constellation of corporeal activities and sensualities, we accomplish nothing less than a reconfiguration of the body’s position in relation to sense and meaning making” (p. 127). In other words, discrete sounds are not the central feature of music; rather, music includes all the embodied activities that precede sound. She argued, “Singing happens before the sound; it is the action that produces sound. Listening, then, takes place in the shared activity of singing – the shared actions of moving and being moved” (p. 130). In this way, listening is not only understood as relationally linked to music making, but listening is an embodied part of the music making activity. Listening, in part, makes music. The significance of this idea for listening beyond the context of music is that the act of listening is never separate from that which is listened to. Just as listening is part of singing, listening is also part of the emergent relationship with others. Listening to and with the body invites a recognition of the ways the act of listening creates material relationships with others. Listening is an embodied way of coming to know others. This production of knowledge is always enabled and constrained by our embodied practice and position in the world. A commitment to listening to and with the body is a commitment to reflexively acknowledging and emphasizing the unique ways we are positioned in relationship to others.

Commitment # 3: Listening for Context and Location The third commitment of performative listening centers on context and location. Listening is an act that is highly contextual and located. There are two primary implications of this commitment. First, various contexts and locations offer various approaches to listening. Second, context and location provide opportunities for listening and creating new understandings of others and the world.

404 McRae Performative listening is an approach that strives to recognize the role context and location play in shaping listening practice. Another example from musicology helps clarify this idea. Stockfelt (1997) suggested that different musical genres invite us to listen in different ways, and that as listeners we can work to develop different modes of listening for different musical styles, situations, or contexts (pp. 132–137). For example, music that is classified as popular invites different modes of listening than music that is classified as opera. In this way, listening emerges and is enacted differently depending on the relational context created by the musical event. Performative listening, as a research practice, is committed to recognizing the ways context and location inform the ways listening is enacted. Different modes of listening are developed to match different listening situations (e.g., a concert, a lecture, a personal relationship). The second implication of the commitment to listening for context and location is related to what Stewart (2011) referred to as atmospheric attunements. This is an approach to interpreting and imagining the world which suggests that we attend to contexts as dynamic and sensuous series of events, forms, and forces. In her explanation of atmospheric attunement as a generative practice, Stewart (2011) posed the following questions: What happens if we approach worlds not as the dead or reeling effects of distant systems but as lived affects with tempos, sensory knowledges, orientations, transmutations, habits, rogue force fields… ? What might we do with the proliferation of little worlds of all kinds that form up around conditions, practices, manias, pacings, scenes of absorption, styles of living, forms of attachment (or detachment), identities, and imaginaries, or some publicly circulating strategy for self‐­ transformation? (p. 446)

Attuning to atmospheres is a way of understanding context in motion and attending to the accumulation of material conditions, social and cultural forms, and habitual practices. Similarly, performative listening works to listen to and for context and location as dynamic sites that also affect interactions and experiences. Performative listening is attuned not just to what others do or say, but also to the context and location from which the utterances and actions of others emerge.

Commitment # 4: Listening with Accountability The final commitment of performative listening is a commitment to listening with a­ ccountability. This reflexive ethic informs the practice of performative listening by acknowledging the ways listening practice is always partial, biased, and linked to cultural and social privileges and ­proclivities. Performative listening works to account for these facts by reflexively considering, naming, and adjusting for the positioning of the listener. Thus, a commitment to listening with accountability in qualitative research is connected to and complementary of a critical reflexive practice. Listening with accountability is an act that is committed to developing awareness and ­recognition of the ways the self is constituted and positioned culturally. In her discussion of rhetorical listening as a “code of cross‐cultural conduct,” Ratcliffe (2005) presented the idea of an accountability logic as a way of acknowledging and understanding the effects of privilege in enabling and constraining interactions with others across cultural difference. She noted: A logic of accountability invites us to consider how all of us are, at present, culturally implicated in effects of the past (via our resulting privileges and/or their lack) and, thus, accountable for what we do about situations now, even if we are not responsible for their origins. (p. 32)

Performative listening also works from a logic of accountability to understand and acknowledge the ways listeners are always linked to historical, social, and cultural structures – ­structures that are enabling for some and constraining for others.



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The commitment to listening with accountability is a move toward practicing a critical reflexivity that works to not only name and acknowledge the positioning of the listener, but that also works to transform the position of the listener and the kinds of relationships that listening might produce (Adams & Holman Jones, 2011). This move engages Madison’s (2011) conception of reflexivity that produces “ongoing effects” (p. 131). The commitment to listening with accountability in qualitative research is an ongoing process and effort. Accordingly, it is a practice that engages the possibility of creating new relationships across difference.

Future Directions: Performative Listening as Opening This chapter began with my narration of the sounds that I encountered while writing in a public space to demonstrate the possibilities afforded to the curious listener. On a second writing hour at the same location, I find myself unable to concentrate on my writing because I am distracted by the conversation at a nearby table. What sounds like a sales pitch starts to interfere with my ability to organize my thoughts in writing. So, I move my computer, my coffee, and my body to another table. Again, I find myself in range of a conversation that catches my attention. And unlike the sales pitch, which I find mildly annoying, this conversation catches me off guard, and I find myself frozen. In this conversation, the speakers present a political commentary that sounds exclusionary and in stark contrast to my own beliefs and values. It’s a position that I am not used to witnessing in such proximity. The conversation reveals myself to me, and I find myself unable to continue working. I pack my belongings, and I leave. Performative listening follows the four commitments of listening with curiosity, listening to and with the body, listening for context and location, and listening with accountability as guiding principles to shape a reflexive research practice and way of engaging others. This approach invites and welcomes the opportunity to learn from and be changed by the experience, ­perspectives, and sounds of others. For example, in the above description of my listening experience at the restaurant, there are multiple ways that I might enter this site and practice performative listening. I might enter this site as a researcher hoping to learn from an experience of a cultural group or individual (McRae, 2015). I might listen for cultural and historical significance of the location or geographic features of this moment (MacDonald, 2015). I might engage the words and texts of others to theorize and practice performative listening as a critical movement toward enacting and inciting social change (Palmer‐Mehta, 2016). And though these possibilities did not inform my listening in that instance, the four commitments of performative listening do suggest a way of engaging and hearing important lessons in my initial act of overhearing or eavesdropping in this restaurant. I am, at first, listening with a kind of curiosity. I begin with the catalog of noticeable sounds in the restaurant, but my stance of curiosity is disrupted by the content of conversations that I find to be annoying and challenging. Second, I am listening with and to my body in this space. My physical position places my body in the proximity of both human and nonhuman others. My embodied encounter of the conversations of others leads me to physically change locations and move farther and farther away from these sounds. Third, my listening is always situated within a context and location that shapes what I hear and how I listen. This is a public restaurant, there are other bodies and objects nearby, and these bodies and objects are performing expected and familiar roles in the context of a restaurant. Kitchen tools sound, the preparation of food sounds, and the activities (eating, talking, working) of other people in this location sound. Finally, the conversation that I overhear that causes me to move and eventually leave the restaurant raises a question of accountability: How is it that my listening led to this dramatic, albeit mundane, response?

406 McRae Taken together, the commitments of performative listening can draw our attention to the limits of our listening, and they might suggest opportunities for listening to and engaging others differently. For example, the moments in which I leave the restaurant provide an opening for the kind of critical reflexivity that performative listening invites. I move after leaving the proximity of the first conversation as the result of what I hear as an annoying distraction. This movement, and my annoyance, are both a matter of my privilege and social position. It is my privilege of course to afford the opportunity and mobility to work in this restaurant. And it is an indication of my cultural and social position as a scholar to hear and evaluatively ­categorize this conversation as annoying. The second conversation that I overheard as primarily a political commentary gives me even greater pause because I remove myself not only from the immediate proximity, but from the physical possibility of hearing these two people entirely. How is it that I have never found myself in such proximity to political speech that I find so oppositional? Perhaps this points to a cultural and historical moment in terms of a political climate. It is likely no coincidence that this overheard conversation occurs a few weeks before a major election in America. And this moment certainly points to a privilege of being able to remain in, at the very least an illusion of, the comfort and safety of my own political worldview. Additionally, I wonder what my move to leave the restaurant teaches me about my own limited capacity for empathy and understanding of the experiences and perspectives of others. This moment teaches me, as the commitments of performative listening suggest, that the opportunity afforded by listening to others might ultimately entail a learning about and transformation of the self. Performative listening casts research and listening as a pedagogical opportunity for listening, learning, and transformation. Performative listening opens toward future qualitative research in at least three distinct ways. First, although performative listening is not exclusively about hearing sounds, future research projects might take up performative listening as a way of attending to sounds as culturally and communicatively rich sites of inquiry across a variety of contexts, locations, and interactions with others. Second, as a sensory and fully embodied mode of engaging the world and others, performative listening invites a framing of future research projects in terms of embodiment and sensory experience. For example, performative listening invites research questions that begin with a consideration of the embodied ­ experience and implications of interactions, events, and communicative phenomena. Finally, performative listening offers an invitation and strategy for practicing critical reflexivity in qualitative research. The commitments of performative listening provide a starting place for practicing reflexivity as a guiding ethic of qualitative inquiry. The hope and possibility of performative listening emerges from this openness to learn from and be transformed by listening to and for the world and others.

References Adams, T. E., & Holman Jones, S. (2011). Telling stories: Reflexivity, queer theory, and autoethnography. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, 11, 108–116. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1532708611401329 Beard, D. (2009). A broader understanding of the ethics of listening: Philosophy, cultural studies, media studies and the ethical listening subject. International Journal of Listening, 23, 7–20. https://doi. org/10.1080/10904010802591771 Bogart, A. (2007). And then, you act: Making art in an unpredictable world. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (1988). Performative acts and gender constitution: An essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. Theatre Journal, 40, 519–531. doi: 10.2307/3207893 Conquergood, D. (1985). Performing as a moral act: Ethical dimensions of the ethnography of performance. Literature in Performance, 5, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/10462938509391578



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Dolan, J. (2005). Utopia in performance: Finding hope at the theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Eidsheim, N. S. (2015). Sensing sound: Singing & listening as vibrational practice. Durham: Duke University Press. Fassett, D. L., & Warren, J. T. (2007). Critical communication pedagogy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Feld, S. (2015). Acoustemology. In D. Novak & M. Sakakeeny (Eds.), Keywords in sound (pp. 2–21). Durham: Duke University Press. Gadamer, H. (2004). Truth and method (2nd ed.; J. Weinsheimer & D. G. Marshall, Trans.). London: Continuum. (Original work published 1975) Hamera, J. (2006). Introduction: Opening Opening acts. In J. Hamera (Ed.), Opening acts: Performance in/as communication and cultural studies (pp. 1–10). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Ihde, D. (2007). Listening and voice: Phenomenologies of sound (2nd ed.). Albany: SUNY Press. Lipari, L. (2009). Listening otherwise: The voice of ethics. International Journal of Listening, 23, 44–59. https://doi.org/10.1080/10904010802591888 MacDonald, S. M. (2015). Listening to a lighthouse: A researcher’s prologue. Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, 4, 32–57. doi: 10.1525/dcqr.2015.4.2.32 Madison, D. S. (2006). The dialogic performative in critical ethnography. Text and Performance Quarterly, 26, 320–324. https://doi.org/10.1080/10462930600828675 Madison, D. S. (2011). The labor of reflexivity. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, 11, 129–138. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708611401331 McRae, C. (2012). Listening to a brick: Hearing location performatively. Text and Performance Quarterly, 32, 332–348. https://doi.org/10.1080/10462937.2012.702219 McRae, C. (2015). Performative listening: Hearing others in qualitative research. New York: Peter Lang. Palmer‐Mehta, V. (2016). Theorizing listening as a tool for social change: Andrea Dworkin’s discourses on listening. International Journal of Communication, 10, 4176–4192. https://ijoc.org/index. php/ijoc/article/view/5862 Pollock, D. (2007). The performative “I.” Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, 5, 239–255. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708606288649 Ratcliffe, K. (2005). Rhetorical listening: Identification, gender, whiteness. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Stewart, K. (2011). Atmospheric attunements. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29, 445–453. https://doi.org/10.1068/d9109 Stockfelt, O. (1997). Adequate modes of listening. (A. Kassabian, & L. G. Svendsen, Trans.). In  D.  Schwarz, A. Kassabian, & L. Siegel (Eds.) Keeping score: Music, disciplinarity, culture (pp. 129–146). Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Warren, J. T. (2008). Performing difference: Repetition in context. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 1, 290–308. https://doi.org/10.1080/17513050802344654

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Augmented Reality Mark Roman Miller and Jeremy N. Bailenson

Augmented reality’s (AR) ability to integrate virtual content into everyday life has been the subject of both promises and warnings. AR makes it possible to “beam in” participants around the world to share a space for discussion. In addition to the facial cues a video call may provide, AR allows communication through the channels of personal space and posture. Yet AR also affords users the ability to see individual content, leaving others nearby with no understanding of what is happening – and in the worst case, the users aren’t aware of the others’ unawareness. AR poses opportunities and challenges for communication researchers. In this chapter, we define AR, outline applicable theories in communication and social psychology, and review relevant literature.

Augmented Reality The most widely cited definition of AR is “any system that…(1) combines real and virtual, (2) is interactive in real time, [and] (3) is registered in three dimensions” (Azuma, 1997, p. 356). The first condition contrasts AR with virtual reality; the second, with computer‐generated models in live‐action movies; and the third, with video annotations or overlays. Milgram and Kishino (1994) proposed a continuum between reality and virtual reality (VR), and placed AR, mixed reality, and augmented virtuality along this continuum (see Figure 28.1). Mann (1999) proposed a two‐dimensional model where the intensity of the virtual world and the real world can vary separately. This framing provides an additional concept called diminished reality where real objects are computationally “taken out” of the real world.

Theoretical Background How do these technical and perceptual features influence communication behavior and listening? Computer‐mediated communication tends to be designed and built with a communication outcome in mind. Therefore, a theory allowing predictions of human communication behavior is useful to the designers and developers of mediating technology. In this section, we describe three theories useful for understanding behavior of AR communicators. First is Clark The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Miller and Bailenson Mixed Reality (MR)

Real Environment

Augmented Reality (AR)

Augmented Virtuality (AV)

Virtual Environment

Figure 28.1  Simplified representation of a “virtuality continuum” (Milgram & Kishino, 1994).

and Brennan’s theory of common ground (1991). The other two theories  –  presence and social influence – come from research in VR that has recently been tested with AR.

Common ground Common ground, a theory of communication put forward by Clark and Brennan (1991), ­suggests that interlocutors come to understand each other by building off mutual knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions. Moreover, this building process, known as grounding, is inherently a joint action, requiring both parties to be aware of their role in the conversation as well as the other’s expectations of the role. The theory highlights the fact that listeners, not just speakers, help co‐narrate any given communication exchange (see Bavelas, Coates, & Johnson, 2000). For example, a conversation between two researchers in the same research group is likely to include technical jargon, as both participants know that each of them understands such ­specialized language. The researchers may avoid using the same jargon with a visitor to the lab, until they signals that they understand, perhaps by using the jargon themself. A communication medium, then, can be understood in terms of its “constraints” or “resources” available for grounding. Clark and Brennan (1991) outline eight constraints: ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●●

Copresence: A and B share the same physical environment. Visibility: A and B are visible to each other. Audibility: A and B communicate by speaking. Cotemporality: B receives at roughly the same time as A produces. Simultaneity: A and B can send and receive at once and simultaneously. Sequentiality: A’s and B’s turns cannot get out of sequence. Reviewability: B can review A’s messages. Revisability: A can revise messages for B.

Media can vary along these dimensions independently, though they are often correlated. For example, face‐to‐face communication allows the first six – copresence, visibility, audibility, cotemporality, simultaneity, and sequentiality  –  while written media tends to allow the last two – reviewability and revisability. AR blurs the constraint of copresence in two ways. When participants are not co‐present, they can be in some version of a shared space. For example, an AR telepresence application can show an interlocutor’s height, posture, and other embodied signals in natural space, rather than compressed onto a 2D screen, providing the constraint of spatiality. Second, co‐presence of individual objects (real or virtual) can vary separately. This variation, if not managed, can v­ iolate participants’ expectations and reduce common ground. To illustrate, consider this interaction between two visitors to Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. One participant, Chris, who was wearing an AR headset, walked towards an AR sphere, which happened to be about two feet in front of another tour member, Alex. Alex looked at Chris uncomfortably, and as Chris got closer, shifted out of his way. Alex couldn’t see where the ball was, and so she didn’t perceive why Chris was walking towards her. Chris expected the co‐presence of the ball to be



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common ground between him and Alex, but it was not. Importantly, this loss of common ground is not limited to virtual objects. It is possible that AR content may obstruct the view of real objects, allowing co‐presence of real objects to vary as well. An understanding of this grounding process will aid AR application designers in pursuit of a communication outcome. For example, if it is necessary to have “private” and “public” virtual objects, it may be important to visually distinguish between the two. If conversation participants are remotely located, it may be helpful to show some of each participant’s space. For example, repeated glances in a direction may be interpreted in different ways depending if the object glanced at is a clock, door, or window.

Immersion, Presence, and Their Effects on Behavior Immersion and presence relate to how “real” the virtual world feels. To distinguish the technical from the experiential features of the medium, Slater and Wilbur (1997) defined immersion as “a description of a technology, [that] describes the extent to which the computer displays are capable of delivering an inclusive, extensive, surrounding and vivid illusion of reality to the senses of a human participant” (p. 3). In contrast, presence is psychological, referring to the “perceptual illusion of nonmediation” (Lombard & Ditton, 1997, “Presence Explicated, ” para. 1). Immersion does lead to greater presence, but other psychological factors also a play a role. Presence can be broken down further (Biocca, Harms, & Burgoon, 2003; C. S. Oh, Bailenson, & Welch, 2018). Telepresence refers to the environment, self‐presence refers to the self, and social presence refers to others nearby. Though related, these three components can vary separately. For example, if one shares a virtual space with an avatar, but the avatar’s operator has left the headset, one will likely experience telepresence but little social presence. The study of presence and immersion is concentrated in VR, but some AR researchers have worked to extend this idea of presence beyond VR. Regenbrecht and Schubert (2002), for instance, pointed out that presence in AR should not be framed as an “I am there,” but rather an “it is here.” They designed and tested an AR presence questionnaire with 300 subjects over four AR experiences and found AR presence includes sub‐components of “realness,” “spatial presence,” and “perceptual stress.” In a similar study, Tang, Biocca, and Lim (2004) compared augmented and virtual reality. Participants in the study felt more spatial presence in AR than VR, but had similar feelings of engagement, naturalness, and simulator sickness across the two conditions. The authors proposed that the real world visible through the AR headset produced this difference in spatial presence. Presence tends to mediate responses to virtual stimuli. If a research participant feels more present, they are more likely to respond to a virtual stimulus as if it is real. For example, in AR, a virtual pit elicits similar behavioral responses to a real one (Gandy et al., 2010). Other studies have found that AR food renderings elicit an arousal response like real food (Pallavicini et al., 2016), cockroaches displayed in AR elicit a strong emotional response and can be used as a phobia treatment (Botella et al., 2005; Juan et al., 2004), and AR objects shown near a place become associated with that place using a “memory palace” technique (Rosello, Exposito, & Maes, 2016). While there is little research on the effects of presence in AR communication, one may use the theory of presence to predict that higher immersion will lead to greater presence and more realistic communication behaviors. Similarly, increasing presence of other virtual objects may distract the user – picture managing a sensitive conversation while a tiger paces in the background. Indeed, the use of AR might be fertile ground for experimental ­testing of the degree to which specific ways of listening (e.g., active‐empathic) or behaviors thought to contribute to an effective listening response (e.g., validating emotions) work in ways current theories propose.

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In summary, immersion and presence distinguish between the technological features and psychological experience of a medium. In carrying over the VR construct of presence to AR, there have been some reformulations and translations necessary, but it is still a useful construct for AR research.

Agency The agency of a virtual human is the perceived source of an actor’s decisions and actions. Agents are computer‐controlled virtual humans, and avatars are human‐controlled. Examples of agents include personal assistants, such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa. Examples of avatars include video game player characters or faces of friends displayed on a video call. Agency is a continuum (Blascovich, 2002). For example, one could have a conversation using a virtual human that tracks the face, body, and voice with full fidelity while a computing process mediates the virtual representation to smile more strongly (S. Y. Oh, Bailenson, Krämer, & Li, 2016). In this case, the virtual character is mostly human‐controlled, but partially computer‐controlled. Research in VR has found that virtual humans tend to elicit automatic social responses (e.g. observing personal space) regardless of agency, but tend to elicit deliberate social responses (e.g., having a deep, meaningful conversation) only inasmuch as the virtual human seems to have agency. Some of these results have been replicated in AR. For example, participants were unlikely to sit in a chair already occupied by a virtual human (Miller et al., 2019).

Research into AR Interactions A key aspect of AR and VR is how individuals interact with one another. In the following ­sections we review research in three related areas, interactions with: co‐located partners, remote partners, and agents.

Interactions with Co‐located Partners Among the research in collaborative, co‐located AR, many papers propose system designs, and some solicit user feedback; however, there are few that empirically evaluate facets of collaboration (Lukosch, Billinghurst, Alem, & Kiyokawa, 2015). One exception is a study by Kiyokawa and colleagues (2002) who measured communication behaviors among different visibility conditions. The task they used involved asking one participant (the trainer/speaker) to communicate to the other participant (the trainee/listener) which virtual block to select out of a wall of about 40. There were four display conditions: 1. optical: a transparent screen displays virtual content; 2. stereo: two video cameras on the front of the VR headset capture the world outside, which is then displayed inside the VR headset; 3. mono: uses a VR headset but with only one camera; and 4. VR: displayed the virtual blocks as well as the partner’s head and headset. Results indicated that trainers located the highlighted block in similar amounts of time, on average, but the time the trainers took to communicate the location of this block to the trainee varied across conditions: optical was fastest, followed by the stereo, mono, and VR conditions, respectively. Interpreted with common ground, one can predict the mono and VR conditions require more time and effort to communicate. The mono display did not allow participants to



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ground using depth, and the display did not allow participants to ground using the body other than head orientation. The importance of body in this communicative task is supported by how most participants still attempted to point, even though their hands were not displayed (see Bavelas & Chovil, 2006). In a second study by Kiyokawa et al. (2002), pairs of participants were given instructions to draw an icon representing a genre of fiction (e.g., mystery, action, sci‐fi) using a shared virtual 31‐by‐31‐pixel canvas. The canvas was positioned between participants in one of three ways – floating, on a wall, or on a table. Results found that placement affected communication behavior. When the virtual canvas was floating, participants made fewer clarifications, more initiations (sentences, commands, suggestions, or questions), and laughed more than in the wall or table conditions. The authors attributed the difference in communication to better grounding in the floating condition because the conversation partner’s face and body were more easily visible. Backed by other work, it seems listeners attend to more than just aural information when attempting to understand others (for review see Bodie & Wolvin, in press). Nilsson, Johansson, and Jönsson (2009) found that AR headsets did not worsen the communication experience in a rescue planning team, despite reducing the amount of eye contact. To explain this effect, a follow‐up study (Prytz, Nilsson, & Jönsson, 2010) suggested that the loss of eye contact was offset by AR’s ability to display different icon languages. Each triad in the study included a firefighter, police officer, and helicopter pilot who were tasked with planning a response to a forest fire. The AR headsets the participants wore displayed visual icons on top of square paper markers. Because the icons the police department used for response planning were different from the fire department’s, a symbol familiar to the firefighter (e.g., a fire truck) would be unfamiliar to the police officer. AR afforded the display of a different symbol depending on the participant’s background. This helped achieve common ground among participants, as the important items in the conversation were not the icons and symbols on the table but rather the objects they represented. Interactions with an AR headset in a space where others do not have a headset can change social interaction. Due (2015) pointed out three ways a headset can change interaction. First, vocal commands, such as “OK Glass, take a picture,” disrupt turn‐taking in conversation. Second, content displayed on the headset is private and unshared and thus interferes with the grounding process. Third, the headset itself prompts questions and causes others to construct an identity of the wearer because they have a headset. AR is not just a medium, but requires artifacts (like headsets), and those artifacts in their own way affect communication.

Interactions with Remote Partners In a study by Wang and Dunston (2009), participants collaboratively looked for errors in pipe designs on either printed paper or with an AR headset. Participants in the headset condition found errors significantly faster than those in the paper condition. This finding was replicated when participants were in separate rooms and able to communicate over speakerphone. The spatial nature of the task matched the spatial affordance of the AR display over printed paper, suggesting the grounding constraint of spatiality separate from copresence. Another study compared two methods (hand vs. cursor pointer) to remotely signal a worker tasked with assembling a toy (Alem & Li, 2011). In the hands condition, a video of the helper’s hand was transmitted allowing the helper to guide the worker in building the toy. In the ­second condition, helpers used a mouse whose arrow cursor could be used to communicate gestures. In both conditions, workers and helpers shared a visual workspace (i.e., a visual overlay of the workspace where both pairs of hands or the worker’s hands and cursor could be viewed). While task completion times for both conditions were about the same, participants subjectively preferred hands over the pointer, suggesting value in grounding through visibility.

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Interactions with Agents AR, like other media, also allows interactions with agents. Similar to work in VR (Blascovich, 2002), these computer‐controlled virtual humans can elicit social responses. One unique feature of AR is the interplay between the real and the virtual. This interplay can affect an agent’s realism. One example of an early study that examined interaction with an embodied agent is the ALIVE system (Maes, Darrell, Blumberg, & Pentland, 1997). In this system, a video camera and tracking system captured participants’ movements and projected an image of the participants along with a virtual character onto a large screen in front of the participants, producing a “magic mirror” effect. The focus of ALIVE was to allow natural nonverbal interactions within a virtual environment. The authors hypothesized that the AR interface would be more effective than a pure VR system (where users could not see their own bodies), and anecdotal accounts of participants supported this prediction. Users reported feeling less disoriented. With the “mirror” metaphor, participants could both see the entire virtual world (as an exo‐ centric view affords) while still allowing natural interaction coming from the self (as an ego‐ centric view affords). Dozens of studies have been conducted over the past few decades that explore interactions with AR agents (for a review, see Holz et al., 2011). Qualitative observations from early studies suggest AR agents tend to elicit social responses, giving evidence that the theory of social influence generalizes to AR. For example, some participants felt intimidated or uncomfortable when an AR agent looked down from above them (Anabuki, Kakuta, Yamamoto, & Tamura, 2000). In another study (Wagner, Billinghurst, & Schmalstieg, 2006), participants felt insulted when the character faced away from them while speaking to them. More recent empirical work also gives evidence to the theory of social influence. There is an effect called social inhibition and facilitation, which describes that participants perform easy tasks faster and hard tasks worse with the addition of an audience. This finding was replicated with an AR agent audience (Miller et al., 2019). Participants solved word puzzles written on a poster board by speaking solution words out loud. The independent variables were difficulty of the word puzzles (easy or hard) and presence or absence of an AR agent. There was a significant interaction effect between difficulty of word puzzles and existence of AR agent on the number of word puzzles solved, such that the addition of the AR agent audience increased the number of easy puzzles solved but decreased the number of hard puzzles. In a different study in the same article, participants avoided violating the personal space of the AR agent. In the experiment, the AR agent spoke to the participant with a short introduction and then sat on a randomly chosen chair (of two of them). Then, the experimenter asked the participant to take a seat in order to fill out a survey. No participant of the 27 sat on the chair that the AR agent occupied. This finding was similar (though less strong) when participants took off the headset right before sitting down. These results suggest people follow rules of social interaction – both through personal space and social presence – when interacting with AR agents. Recent studies by Kim, Lee, Welch, and others demonstrate that embodied agents can achieve higher social presence (as measured by self‐report or behavioral data) by successfully integrating virtual content with the real world. The physical world can affect the virtual world, or vice versa. For instance, in a study by Kim, Bruder, and Welch, (2018), participants interacted with a virtual agent while a real fan was blowing in the room. Participants encountered one of three conditions: the fan did not affect the virtual world, the fan blew the virtual paper, or the virtual agent reacted to this airflow and held down the corner of the paper. Social presence of the virtual agent was greater in the two conditions in which the virtual world reacted to physical events (i.e., when the paper blew and when the virtual agent held down the paper). This work suggests that the more the virtual scenes react as if they were real, the more that virtual characters in those scenes seem real.



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Second, the virtual world can affect the physical world. In a study by Lee, Kim, Daher and Raij (2016), participants played the game “Twenty Questions” with a virtual agent projected onto a screen across a half‐real, half‐virtual table. In one condition, the participant could lean on the real side of the table, causing the virtual side of the table to rise, or the agent could lean forward on the virtual side of the table, causing the opposite effect. In the other condition, the table did not move. Participants with the wobbly table felt greater social presence and presence than those whose table did not wobble. These studies provide evidence that agents can elicit social responses, and the likelihood of a person to respond socially to an AR agent is affected by the integration between the real and virtual worlds. If AR is to become a popular communication medium, designers should understand the effects of placing a virtual person in shared space, as well as ways to increase or decrease realism of the virtual person (whether that be an agent or an avatar) depending on the communication goal in mind.

Future Directions Much work lies ahead for AR communication research. The future of this research field should promote human well‐being. This can be done by pointing out useful cases for AR communication and important drawbacks to design around. Particularly relevant for this Handbook is how listening is different in AR. Though differences between media are often overstated (C. S. Oh et al., 2018), it is important to know how and when AR (which includes spatial cues) leads to better interaction outcomes than video or text‐based communication. To investigate this, future work can continue investigating representations of self and other (Alem & Li, 2011; Kiyokawa et  al., 2002) rather than focus on representation of the task at hand (Wang & Dunston, 2009). Listening relies on common ground (Clark & Brennan, 1991). AR gives the technical ability to break this common ground in new ways. It is important to study this effect, including its boundary conditions. How quickly can participants realize they do not share worlds? What do participants do to ground themselves anyways? It is also valuable to vary the participant’s knowledge of the situation. For example, one may expect a naïve participant who does not know their conversation partner is wearing a headset will likely respond differently from an experienced participant who is aware their conversation partner is seeing AR content. What happens when emotionally charged virtual content becomes associated with places? We know that virtual content can be associated with memories of places even a week after the stimulus (Rosello et al., 2016) and that virtual content can still influence behavior once the headset is removed (Miller et  al., 2019). A person playing a first‐person‐shooter game, for ­instance, may associate that place with the emotionally charged content of the AR game, ­perhaps causing anxiety or avoidance of those negatively emotionally‐charged locations. To describe someone not listening, some use the phrase “they are off in their own world.” AR makes this idiom much more literal. Extending the experience of virtual content to larger groups of people may change the kinds of interactions with virtual content. The novel Rainbow’s End (Vinge, 2006) explores what might happen if groups of people share the same modified world, changing what other buildings and people look like. This may allow new opportunities for those who do not control public spaces to re‐appropriate them (Liao & Humphreys, 2015). AR makes virtual objects present in our everyday experience. In what conditions does this help or harm our ability to listen? This answer depends on who we’re listening to, how much common ground we share, and how present we feel. It is through future research that we will understand this technology and its potential more fully.

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References Alem, L., & Li, J. (2011). A study of gestures in a video‐mediated collaborative assembly task. Advances in Human‐Computer Interaction, 2011, Article ID 987830. https://doi.org/10.1155/2011/ 987830 Anabuki, M., Kakuta, H., Yamamoto, H., & Tamura, H. (2000). Welbo: An embodied conversational agent living in mixed reality space. Proceedings of CHI’2000, Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 10–11). New York: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi. org/10.1145/633292.633299 Azuma, R. T. (1997). A survey of augmented reality. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 6, 355–385. Retrieved from www.cs.unc.edu/~azuma/ARpresence.pdf Bavelas, J. B., & Chovil, N. (2006). Nonverbal and verbal communication: Hand gestures and facial displays as part of language use in face‐to‐face dialogue. In V. Manusov & M. L. Patterson (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Nonverbal Communication (pp. 97–115). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Bavelas, J. B., Coates, L., & Johnson, T. (2000). Listeners as co‐narrators. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 941–952. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022‐3514.79.6.941 Biocca, F., Harms, C., & Burgoon, J. K. (2003). Toward a more robust theory and measure of social presence: Review and suggested criteria. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 12, 456–480. https://doi.org/10.1162/105474603322761270 Blascovich, J. (2002). Social influence within immersive virtual environments (pp. 127–145). In R. Schroeder (Ed.), The social life of avatars. London: Springer. Bodie, G. D., & Wolvin, A. D. (in press). The psychobiology of listening: Why listening is more than meets the ear. In L. Aloia, A. Denes, & J. P. Crowley (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Physiology of Interpersonal Communication. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Botella, C. M., Juan, M. C., Baños, R. M., Alcañiz, M., Guillén, V., & Rey, B. (2005). Mixing realities? An application of augmented reality for the treatment of cockroach phobia. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 8, 162–171. https://doi.org/10.1089/cpb.2005.8.162 Clark, H. H., & Brennan, S. E. (1991). Grounding in communication. In L. B. Resnick, J. M. Levine, & S. D. Teasley (Eds.), Perspectives on socially shared cognition (pp. 127–149). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Due, B. L. (2015). The social construction of a Glasshole: Google Glass and multiactivity in social interaction. PsychNology Journal, 13, 149–178. Gandy, M., Catrambone, R., MacIntyre, B., Alvarez, C., Eiriksdottir, E., Hilimire, M., … McLaughlin, A. C. (2010). Experiences with an AR evaluation test bed: Presence, performance, and physiological measurement. In Proceedings of the 2010 9TH IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (Vol. 1, pp. 127–136). Piscataway, NJ: IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ ISMAR.2010.5643560 Holz, T., Campbell, A. G., Hare, G. M. P. O., Stafford, J. W., Martin, A., & Dragone, M. (2011). MiRA — Mixed Reality Agents. Journal of Human Computer Studies, 69, 251–268. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2010.10.001 Juan, M. C., Botella, C., Alcañiz, M., Baños, R., Carrion, C., Melero, M., & Lozano, J. A. (2004). An augmented reality system for treating psychological disorders: Application to phobia to cockroaches. In ISMAR 2004: Proceedings of the Third IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (pp. 256–257). https://doi.org/10.1109/ISMAR.2004.14 Kim, K., Bruder, G., & Welch, G. F. (2018). Blowing in the wind: Increasing copresence with a virtual human via airflow influence in augmented reality. In G. Bruder, S. Cobb, & S. Yoshimoto (Eds.), International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence Eurographics Symposium on Virtual Environments (pp. 183–190). The Eurographics Association. https://doi.org/10.2312/egve.20181332 Kiyokawa, K., Billinghurst, M., Hayes, S. E., Gupta, A., Sannohe, Y., & Kato, H. (2002). Communication behaviors of co‐located users in collaborative AR interfaces. In Proceedings of the 1st International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR’02) (pp. 139–148). Washington, D.C.: IEEE Computer Society. https://doi.org/10.1109/ISMAR.2002.1115083 Lee, M., Kim, K., Daher, S., & Raij, A. (2016). The wobbly table: Increased social presence via subtle incidental movement of a real‐virtual table. In Proceedings of the IEEE Virtual Reality Conference 2016 (pp. 11–17). Greenville, SC. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/ 7504683/



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Building Peace Through Listening Zenebe Beyene

In this chapter, I examine the role listening plays in the context of peace‐building with a particular focus on how listening helps with the management of existing political tensions in countries on the cusp of forming reliable democratic systems. Ethiopia is used as an extended case study because of its rich history and current interethnic tensions. In researching and writing this chapter, secondary data sources and case studies from other countries are utilized with the goal of providing conceptual constructs for future empirical studies. While the importance of listening in a polarized society like Ethiopia cannot be understated, studies in these contexts are limited, if not non‐existent. By focusing on the realm of peace‐building, I seek to expand our  understanding of how listening in peace‐building is a “new frontier” for scholarship in polarized societies and to contribute to this important, but neglected, topic.

Understanding the Nexus Between Listening and Peace‐building Stephen R. Covey (2004) once said, “The biggest communication problem is that we do not listen to understand. We listen to reply.” (p. 251). Failure to understand what others have to say results in misunderstanding and misperception, both of which can cause serious obstacles in conflict resolution, as dissenting parties seek to advance their own interests. Experiences from post‐conflict societies such as South Africa show that compromise is made possible when groups demonstrate a keenness to listen to each other and comprehend the concerns, pains, and aspirations of the varying parties, and furthermore, a willingness to find common ground. The establishment of the new South Africa, for instance, would not have been possible without the commitment of Nelson Mandela and Frederik de Klerk to compromise (Brockett, 2005). Although several case studies (e.g., Hoffman, 2012; Rivers, 2012; Higgins, 2011) show the importance of listening in peace‐building initiatives, it has been largely overlooked in applied operations. Among the various explanations for this neglect is, foremost, the variability in how scholars and practitioners define listening (see Worthington & Bodie, this volume). For some, listening is a “skill’ which deals with memory and retention. For others, it is the ability to understand spoken language. For both these groups, listening is more a cognitive process. Still others define listening in its broader sense, including affective, behavioral, and cognitive processes, what Bodie (2019) labeled the “ABC of listening” (pp. 261–262): The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

420 Beyene Affective components of listening include how individuals think about listening and their ­motivation and enjoyment of the activity. Individuals’ views about listening and their (often idiosyncratic) barriers to attending to others can have profound effects on comprehension and understanding as well as consequences for personal, professional, and relational success. Listening behaviors are actions such as eye contact and asking questions that serve to signal attention and interest to others. Finally, cognitive elements of listening are those internal processes that operate to enable individuals to attend to, ­comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and make sense of spoken language.

Putting conceptual variations aside, Worthington and Bodie (2017) outlined two consistent points of agreement: “First, listening is a complex set of skills rather than a unitary ability. Second, listening is posited as an essential life skill, important to a range of outcomes, from academic and work success to individual and relational health and well‐being” (pp. 4–5). As will be described, listening is even more important in conflict prevention and transformation as well as peace‐building efforts. When people come together and engage in constructive dialogue, they are more likely to defuse tension, resentment, and animosity among those in conflict. The diffusion of tension and distrust, in turn, helps people form bonds; and it is through relationship building that conflict ultimately turns to compromise. As an example, take a listening project in peace‐building involving participants from Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot communities on the divided island. The study was based on a project that used community‐based media and digital storytelling for peace‐building. It employed the process of participation in group activities involving active listening and the sharing of personal stories, thoughts, and emotions (Higgins, 2011, p. 1). As one participant observed (p. 10): We have bonded in this class in a way we haven’t in other classes. In other classes, maybe we hate each other. But in here we bond together. We see that we are much alike. So thank you for helping us see we are a lot alike. I didn’t dream we had so much in common.

Through sharing personal stories, thoughts, and emotions, the project was able to help groups from different backgrounds, which can appear to have widely different perspectives, move from their hatred and find commonality in shared humanity. The implication is that people are more likely to find commonality when they see each other as fellow humans, and that includes those whom we call enemies. As the late Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin stated, “Peace is not made with friends, it is made with enemies” (as cited in Oberschall, 2007, p. 238). The determination to make peace with enemies requires a willingness to acknowledge the concerns of others. The opportunities to listen to the concerns and pains of others without judgment creates opportunities for the parties involved to find common ground and to ultimately move toward peace‐building. Peace‐building is defined as “a set of processes and tools used by civil society and government actors to transform the relationships, cultures, and institutions of society to prevent, end, and transform conflicts” (Zelizer & Oliphant, 2013, p. 8). One of the most important elements of this definition is its focus on transforming conflict. By transforming conflict, peace builders help recast relationships and reconcile differences; in other words, peace‐building goes beyond the immediate conflict and seeks to build relationships among antagonists. As indicated by Rivers (2012), focusing on relationship building is more important than meeting interests in peace‐building. Rivers stated that conflict resolution based on interest is more likely to fail, as people’s material circumstances shift. More specifically, Rivers (2012, p. 1) wrote: Conflict resolutions based only on interests, even on the interests of all the parties to a conflict, are vulnerable to fall apart as soon as someone’s material circumstances shift. What is needed is for the conflict participants to be able to identify with one another’s sorrows and joys, to feel connected enough to one another to make the peace worth keeping.



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Of course, the process of transforming conflict and relationship, which are at the heart of peace‐building and peacemaking, does not occur in vacuum. In order to change relationships, conflicting parties must engage in constructive dialogue and accept each other’s positions and interests as legitimate (Beyene & Mengistu, 2020). Engagements will generate opportunities for all stakeholders to create bonds and find ways to alter perspectives: from debate to ­dialogue, competitive to complementary, expressing emotion to explaining position, etc. Such a transformational approach (i.e., one that causes change in people and systems) will enable contending parties to bridge differences and work for common goals. One example of what a transformational perspective looks like comes from a statement of an attendee in an active listening workshop in Cyprus: A “lesson for life” is listening to others…It is important to share feelings, and listen to the feelings of others, to a point where it can be cleansing and calming. This is something I can use not only in this course, but in life generally (Higgins, 2011, p. 9).

The ability to hold one’s opinions to oneself and be genuinely interested when listening to others is an important skill for life. The implication of demonstrating interest in what others have to say is what made Nelson Mandela not only a peace maker but also a great leader. When asked, “How did you learn to be a great leader?” he responded that he remembered two things from his experience attending tribal meetings with his father: (i) they would always sit in a circle; and (ii) his father was always the last to speak (as described in Sinek, 2017, Para. 2). Holding one’s opinion and listening first gives one the chance to learn about dreams and concerns of others. If that process is managed well, it has the potential of transmute enemies into partners. At least in the case of South Africa, that is what happened. Nelson Mandela and Frederick de Klerk were enemies who found common ground and worked together as president and vice president of South Africa after the first democratic and inclusive elections in South Africa (Brockett, 2005). What this suggests is the importance of listening in creating constructive engagements, and engagement is a step in the right direction in peace‐building operations. In what follows, I will demonstrate the role of listening in peace‐building in Ethiopia. I have chosen Ethiopia for three main reasons. First, it is my home country; and thus, I have the local knowledge and first‐hand experience necessary to provide deep understanding of this case (see Dutta & Elers, this volume). Second, Ethiopia is a transitioning country. Like in many other countries, the shift towards deeper democracy has come with its own challenges and promises. With the election of Dr. Abiy as the Prime Minister of Ethiopia in April, 2018, the country experienced great optimism. Events following the election also illustrate the many serious challenges the country still faces. A recent report by Reuters underscored the challenges Ethiopia has faced since Abiy’s election: Ethnic violence has spiked since Abiy took power in 2018. He unbanned political parties, [signed a peace agreement with Eritrean President, Isaias Afeworki] and released political prisoners, etc. but saw a resurgence of violence fueled by local powerbrokers demanding more power and resources for their own groups (Paravicini, 2019).

The ethnic tension as well as the looming danger of ethnic violence in the country requires immediate attention. During this time of transition, the challenges Ethiopians face due to the lack of listening among the political elites seem insurmountable. Indeed, the third reason to choose Ethiopia as an extended case study is that the issues this country faces and the role of listening and peace‐building have wider implications for other heterogenous societies in Africa and beyond. As important as listening in peace‐building is, however, I am not under any illusion that listening will solve all conflict. Equally important is the temptation of treating

422 Beyene listening as a periphery in peace‐building. It is important to duly acknowledge the importance of listening in creating constructive engagements among various groups, and engagement is a step in the right direction in peace‐building operations.

The Ethiopian Context Like other traditional societies, Ethiopia is endowed with indigenous wisdom that has been used to address social and economic challenges. For instance, a number of cultural and r­ eligious institutions have contributed to the prevention of violence. The following two cases – drawn from Arba Minch and the southern Ethiopian Rift Valley – illustrate the role that elders have played in conflict prevention in Ethiopia. The first example is seen in a documentary produced by Ivo Strecker and Alula Pankhurst. The film “Bury the Spear!” depicts the peace‐making effort by local elders to end decades of ethnic war in the southern Ethiopian Rift Valley.1 The conflict resolution effort is an interesting one, as the process includes resolving the existing conflict, then converting the traditional weapons (spears) used in mutual destruction to tools of peace like hoes for gardening and farming. What is important in this case is the ability of elders to listen to all parties – the aggressor and the victim (see Hoffman, 2012, for additional detail). As inspiring as the above case is, it is not unique to this particular area of Ethiopia. For example, Gamo elders helped avert recent violence in Ethiopia in another case (Gamo Elders, 2018). In this instance, some people from the Gamo area were targeted by Oromos around the outskirts of Addis Ababa. Following the attack, the youth groups in Arba Minch organized a revenge attack against Oromos in the town. Recognizing the danger, the elders in the town came together and prevented the apparent attack against the Oromos and their businesses. Again, such intervention by elders is frequently observed in inter‐communal violence in Ethiopia. Beyene, Zerai, and Gagliardone (2015) outlined a number of possible interventions, including “gareb in Afar, erki (reconciliation), the baito (assembly), and the mahberawi bet firdi (the Social courts) in Tigray, etc.” (p. 9). Elders’ intervention and informal institutions’ contributions to conflict prevention and peace‐building are the main reasons why Ethiopia has maintained relative peace in some parts of the country for such a long time. Among other factors, what makes the elders effective in conflict resolution in Ethiopia is their ability to listen impartially to all parties. Hoffman (2012) emphasized the importance of listening to all parties, when she wrote, “[W]e should listen to those we consider ‘the enemy’ with the same openness, non‐judgement, and compassion we listen to those with whom our sympathies lie” (p. 2). Nelson Mandela was also a strong advocate of listening and “liberating” both the oppressed and oppressor, arguing that “Both the prisoner and the oppressor needed liberation: the prisoner from the oppressor and the oppressor from his hatred….The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity” (Oppenheim, 2012, p. 388). Helping people regain their humanity is a critical element of conflict transformation. What we see from the elders’ approach to conflict management in Ethiopia is a close similarity with what we might call comprehensive listening, an ability to hear all sides of a conflict without prejudice or favoritism. As rich and responsive as elders, indigenous institutions, and societal culture are, however, the political culture does not reflect that responsiveness nor the civility and decency found in the society. Indeed, following the election of Dr. Abiy Ahmed as prime minister, Ethiopia witnessed

The film is based on peace making efforts by the locals and the technique used to build peace and a brief description of the film can be found at the Documentary Educational Resources website: https://store. der.org/bury‐the‐spear‐p219.aspx.

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(and continues to witness) renewed hope. For one, Dr. Ahmed has ushered in s­everal changes never seen before: the release of political prisoners (including those sentenced to death), an inclusive diaspora engagement approach, the opening of the political space, etc. Such actions are what some have atributed to his receiving the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize. As system‐shifting as his actions were, however, many remain concerned regarding whether or not a coherent policy can be designed to channel such strong enthusiasm into meaningful and measurable outcomes in reconciliation, peacemaking, and peace‐building (Beyene & Mengistu, 2020). The concerns raised following Dr. Ahmed’s election seem to emanate from the legacy of an old and intolerant political culture. As a result, the hopes and dreams of the people for a new era in an ancient country have faced new challenges that can be summarized as a battle for the heart and soul of the nation. Along with other social, historical, and economic factors, the failure of the political elites to compromise plays a significant part in perpetuating past violence and creating new areas of discord. They have failed to learn from past mistakes, they do not address differences with respect, and they seem to accept violence as the only way to salvation (Beyene & Mengistu, 2020; Mengie, 2015). The result has been a vicious cycle of violence, and the real possibility of civil war (Berhane & Tefera, 2018). According to Berhane and Tefera (2018), “between 1997 and 2016, close to 33 major ethnic‐based conflicts erupted in the country owing mainly to boundary disputes and demarcations fueled by political elites… [and] the number of conflicts is likely to have an increasing trend” (p.121–122). They noted that the perpetual violence has made Ethiopia home for “over 800,000 Internally Displaced people (IDPs)” (p. 117). The above figures suggest that the hope for a better future has been somehow thwarted and replaced by cynicism. Unfortunately, recent history does not spark optimism. The past few decades indicate that subsequent regimes in Ethiopia have not succeeded in removing the vicious circle of violence. According to Gebremariam and Herrera (2016), “Ethiopia’s political history in the post‐revolution period is filled with harsh political violence and terror, a civil war, and the intimidation and coercion of people who have dared to challenge the two post‐revolution regimes” (p. 148). Why are these figures and trends troubling? Modern history demonstrates that civil war costs millions of lives in different parts of the world. The American civil war, the civil war in Nigeria (what is called the Biafran war), the ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, and the Rwandan genocide are cases in point. Although civil wars can be caused by multiple factors (e.g., economic, social, political, resources), in heterogenous societies like Ethiopia, ethnic politics is an incredibly important factor that ultimately breeds ethnic tension. Ethiopia saw a rise in ethnic conflict after ethinic politics became institutionalized in 1991. The excessive attention to ethnic politics undermined national identity and facilitated hate propaganda against one another. Without an inclusive framework that would entertain diversity, it weakens national unity by dividing communities between “us” and “them,” eroding shared values and leading to mutual self‐destruction. Although identity‐based politics may be a contributing cause of many of the civil wars the world has witnessed, it can also be an asset. Countries such as America have managed differences and have used it for their advantage. Their principle “out of many, one” is not only recognition of diversity but also a commitment to manage differences with civility. Doing so has enabled countries such as America to prosper. In contrast, the political elites in Ethiopia have sought to manage differences with force and violence, and Ethiopia’s recent history has demonstrated that violence will not ensure security (Beyene, 2012; Beyene & Mengistu, 2020). If anything, violence creates a vicious cycle in which offenders and victims take turns engaging in violent acts. Recent political developments in Ethiopia exemplify the unpleasant outcome of a rigid political culture. For the last 25 years, power was dominated by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). The group, led by some hardliners, considered compromise a sign of weakness. Subsequently, they rejected any efforts at national reconciliation. One such missed opportunity occurred after the 2005

424 Beyene controversial elections in Ethiopia. Beyene and Mengistu (2020, p. 178) addressed this missed opportunity and the subsequent action by the TPLF‐led administration: In the context of Ethiopia, a classic example was what happened subsequent to the 2005 national election. Despite the repeated efforts of the team of national elders and diaspora peacemakers, the then Ethiopian national government refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the coalition of the national parties, called Kinijet, and to consent to come to a negotiating table for win‐win negotiated outcomes. The result of this lack of the crucial first step to a negotiated settlement was the death of hundreds of Ethiopians and the imprisonment of the political party leaders for 18 months.

At a minimum, the initial step in negotiation is the willingness to acknowledge the concerns of others. In the post 2005 controversial elections in Ethiopia, that did not happen. Fifteen years later, the then‐policy makers found themselves on the receiving end. Following the election of Prime Minister Abiy in April 2018, some of them have been imprisoned, a few are in exile, and many others are “hiding” in Tigray. Taking turns and targeting those who do not share their political ideology is rooted in the political culture. Successive administrations and other political elites have had opportunities to reverse this hostile political culture. Opportunities for genuine reconciliation and structural reform have come and gone, and Ethiopians are left still dreaming of the time when their country will reject this pattern of political vendetta. Understanding the missed opportunities in the past, Ethiopia’s political leaders should come out of the illusion that force and violence will make them victorious and triumphant. Unfortunately, it appears that history has repeated itself, bringing the country to the brink of collapse. To reverse the apparent danger and chart a new course, the political elites must change the approach and tone of politics in the country. Listening is key to such a new reorientation  –  one where listening to the pains and fears as well as the hopes and dreams of fellow Ethiopians are not just a one‐time event but become part of the political culture, defined by a mindset expressed by columnist Cindy Lange‐Kubick (2019): “I’m not going to try to win, I’m going to try to listen.” Being open minded and interested in what others have to say will result in a win‐win situation, while seeking to win at any cost is more likely to result in a zero‐sum game. The latter assumes that the other party must lose in order for me to win. In contrast, listening and compromise can create opportunities for parties to find common ground. Finding common ground, establishing trust, and building relationships are vital to reducing tension and animosity among groups with different and often conflicting interests; it has the potential to be a liberating and cleansing process, which can facilitate reconciliation. As reported in post‐conflict societies such as South Africa, listening to each other and the commitment to find common ground has enabled them to move forward (Brockett, 2005). Inviting people to air out their grievances is not a sign of weakness, nor should engagement with them and compromise be equated with complacency. No real victory can be achieved by killing one’s own brothers and sisters, and that is what a “my way or the high way” mindset will create.

Conclusion This chapter has explored the possibilities of listening and civil discourse for peace‐building efforts, particularly as they relate to Ethiopia. Political culture seriously affects people’s ability and need to listen to each other, and by extension the ability to compromise on major national agenda items such as nation building. Ethiopia, which is cited by both the Holy Bible and The Qu’ran for its hospitality (Pankhurst, 1998; Beyene, 2019) has become a difficult place for its own children. How did we get to this point? What went wrong? How can we get out of this crisis? What is the role of listening in the process? The above sections highlight possible answers to those questions.



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In particular, the chapter underscores how listening and civil discourse have been seriously challenged by the “my way or the highway” mindset imbedded in the political culture in Ethiopia. This mindset encourages people to talk, but not to listen to those with differing worldviews. It also makes the process of peacemaking and peace‐building difficult. In addition to mindset, obstructions to peace lie in the lack of willingness on the part of political leaders to compromise. The past few decades have demonstrated that political elites view compromise dialogue and humility as weakness and cowardice. The misperception about compromise and dialogue, coupled with the enduring contentions that have been the hallmark of Ethiopian politics, has threatened a social fabric that has long served as national glue. Today, in many parts of the country, fellow Ethiopians are treated as “strangers” because of their ethnic identity – the outcome of the exclusionist policy that the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) has followed since 1991. Contrary to the experience and expectations of many, EPRDF’s stance on ethnic federalism as the only savior of Ethiopia has cost the nation many opportunities. The government policy on compartmentalizing the nation along ethnic lines has encouraged people to stay in their echo chambers. As a result, they rarely show interest to entertain alternative perspectives and ideas. The irony of such an approach is that the political elites demand democracy. Democracy is all about having voices, which is vital for heterogenous societies like Ethiopia, but we should also ask ourselves: If everyone has a voice but no one is listening, how can democracy help societies find common ground (see Macnamara, this volume)? The echo chamber that has been cultivated and nurtured threatens the very existence of the nation. There is little incentive for people to form cross‐cutting alliances. Political candidates do not need to attract voters from other regions or ethnic groups. They run a campaign in their own region by appealing to what they can do for their region and/or ethnic groups, but not for the country. The excessive attention to a region at the expense of a coherent national agenda has undermined Ethiopia’s long‐standing culture of tolerance and co‐existence. As well as revisiting the exclusionist policy that Ethiopia has followed since 1991, revisiting the existing communication infrastructure is an urgent agenda for the country. It begins with a change in emphasis – a move from speaking to listening. Shifting emphasis is particularly necessary during times of crisis, when societies need more listening. Unless we establish and strengthen listening infrastructure to encourage people to listen to each other with respect and without judgment, achieving much needed national objectives will remain a dream. In contrast, if we recognize our weaknesses and face them with commitment, all is not lost. The most important requirement for change in the country is for the political culture to lend itself to revision. When that happens, we will find healing for the illnesses of the country, and listening to each other is the first step.

References Berhane, Z., & Tefera, S. (2018). Does federalism reduce ethnic conflict? Evidence from the Ethiopian experience. Ethiopian Journal of Social Science and Humanities, 14, 105–131. Beyene, Z., & Mengistu, B. (2020). The role of the Ethiopian diaspora in political affairs of the h ­ omeland: A quest for an inclusive policy framework. In U. Onyebadi (Ed.), Multidisciplinary issues ­surrounding African diasporas (pp. 175–198). Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Beyene, Z. (2019). From an emperor to the Derg and beyond: Examining the intersection of music and politics in Ethiopia. In U. Onyebadi (Ed.), Music and messaging in the African political arena (pp. 1–21). Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Beyene, Z., Zerai, A., & Gagliardone, I. (2015). Satellites, plasmas and law: The role of telecourt in changing conceptions of justice and authority in Ethiopia. Stability: International Journal of Security & Development, 4, 1–13. http://doi.org/10.5334/sta.fn

426 Beyene Beyene, Z. (2012). The role of media in ethnic violence during political transition in Africa: The case of Rwanda and Kenya. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE. Bodie, G. D. (2019). Listening. In O. Hargie (Ed.), The handbook of communication skills (4th ed., pp. 259–286). New York: Routledge. Brockett, M. A. (2005). Nelson Mandela and F. W. de Klerk: A comparative rhetorical analysis of their visions of a new South Africa. Intercultural Communication Studies, 14, 66–81. Retrieved from https://web.uri.edu/iaics/2005‐vol‐14‐no‐1/ Covey, S. R. (2004). The 7 habits of highly effective people. New York: Simon & Schuster Gamo elders intervention to avert retaliation got Ethiopians talking. (2018, Sept. 19). Borkena Ethiopian News. Retrieved from https://borkena.com/2018/09/19/gamo‐elders‐intervention‐to‐avert‐ retaliation‐got‐ethiopians‐talking/ Gebremariam, E. B., & Herrera, L. (2016). On silencing the next generation: Legacies of the 1974 Ethiopian revolution on youth political engagement. Northeast African Studies, 16, 141–166. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/nortafristud.16.1.0141 Higgins, J. W. (2011). Peace‐building through listening, digital storytelling, and community media in Cyprus. Global Media Journal: Mediterranean Edition, 6. Retrieved from https://www.academia. edu/8458982/Peace‐building_Through_Listening_Digital_Storytelling_and_Community_ Media_in_Cyprus Hoffman, G. K. (2012, March). Compassionate listening: A first step toward reconciliation. In D. Rivers (Ed.), Compassionate listening – An exploratory sourcebook about conflict transformation (pp. 2–4). Retrieved from www.newconversations.net/pdf/compassionate_listening.pdf Lange‐Kubick, C. (2019, October 15). Cindy Lange‐Kubick: “I’m not going to try to win, I’m going to try to listen.” Lincoln Journal Star. Retrieved from https://journalstar.com/news/local/cindy‐ lange‐kubick‐i‐m‐not‐going‐to‐try‐to/article_a54dab18‐b337‐552f‐b570‐11e48e5ac9e2.html Mengie, L. T. (2015). Ethnic federalism and conflict in Ethiopia: What lessons can other jurisdictions draw? African Journal of International and Comparative Law 23, 462–475. https://doi. org/10.3366/ajicl.2015.0131 Oberschall, A. (2007). Conflict and peace‐building in divided societies: Responses to ethnic violence. London: Routledge. Oppenheim, C. E. (2012). Nelson Mandela and the power of Ubuntu. Religions, 3, 369–388. https:// doi.org/10.3390/rel3020369 Pankhurst, R. (1998). The Ethiopians. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Paravicini, G. (2019, Oct 4). Attacks kill 22 in Ethiopia’s Amhara region ‐ party official. AfricaTech. Reuters. Retrieved from https://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFKBN1WJ0Q0‐OZATP Rivers, D. (2012, March). Introduction. In D. Rivers’s (Ed.) Compassionate listening – An exploratory sourcebook about conflict transformation. Retrieved from www.newconversations.net/pdf/ compassionate_listening.pdf Sinek, S. (2017, April 4). Great leaders do 2 things: Sit in circle & be the last to speak. [Blog]. Retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/great‐leaders‐do‐2‐things‐sit‐circle‐last‐speak‐sochheka Worthington, D. L., & Bodie, G. D. (2017). Defining listening: A historical, theoretical, and pragmatic assessment. In D. L. Worthington & G. D. Bodie (Eds.) Sourcebook of listening research: Methodology & measurement (pp. 3–17). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Zelizer, C., & Oliphant, V. (2013). Introduction to integrated peacebuilding. In C. Zelizer (Ed.), Integrated peacebuilding: Innovative approaches to transforming conflict (pp. 3–30). New York: Routledge.

30

Silence Robin Patric Clair

Silence, whether it is the pause between words or the suppression of a people, can be e­ xpressive and powerful (e.g., Clair, 1998; Hedges & Fishkin, 1994; Olsen, 1979). Listening can be equally potent. Listening to the words of others has received much scholarly attention, as the chapters of this handbook attest. Various conceptualizations, perspectives, and applications have been discussed. Areas that have received less attention include the relationship between silence and listening, the dialectical nature of silence and listening, and the confusion over literal and figurative elements of silence and listening. I begin with the latter.

Silence and Listening on a Shifting Continuum Dictionaries define literal and figurative in contrast to one another. Literal is “taking words in their usual or most basic sense without metaphor or allegory,” and the definition of figurative is “depart­ ing from a literal use of words; metaphorical” (Dictionary, n.d., n.p.). The relationship of the two are portrayed as if they are distinct, stable, and bifurcated. Denotative definitions of literal and figurative have not quite kept apace of postmodernity with its treatises on truth and discourse as multiple, shifting, and complex (Foucault, 1966/1989). For instance, dialectical distinctions bet­ ween literal and figurative disappeared with the introduction of the simulacrum – where the literal becomes the figurative, which then becomes the literal (see e.g., Baudrillard, 1983, 1987/2012). My point in addressing this matter is to make the reader cognizant of the various ways in which scholars approach silence and listening with respect to the literal and figurative continuum or dialectic, and to recognize that the continuum is pliable according to postmodern philosophy. To begin, only a vacuum or perhaps a sensory deprivation tank can provide a total literal absence of sound. As Bruneau (1973) explained, “Silence does not exist in the physical absolute – notions to the contrary are mythical” (p. 17). He believed that silence exists as a cognitive process of the mind and that various forms of silence function in particular ways. Bruneau noted that silence is connected to another concept of the mind – time. As “psycholinguistic silence,” it functions to give pause between language sounds and thus to give meaning and structure even as it disrupts or interrupts words (p. 17). There are two kinds of psycholinguistic time, fast time and slow time silence. When silence seems to expand time, Bruneau (1973) called it “Psycholinguist slow‐time silence” (p. 21); when it is low in intensity and of a seemingly short duration, it is The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

428 Clair

Figure 30.1  Three‐dimensional model of multiple circular continua. Geek3 ©2011 Sphere wireframe 10deg 6r.svg

called “Psycholinguist fast‐time silence” (p. 17). Two other major forms of silence, according to Bruneau, are “Interactive silence” and “Sociocultural silence” (p. 17). Bruneau’s model leans toward the assessment of literal silence in each of these contexts (e.g., pauses between words, silence by a conversational partner, group silence following an inappropriate comment, s­ hunning as in the Amish community), but also hints at figurative silence.

Silence: Literal and Figurative Continuum or Dialectical Rendering One of the earliest treatises on the literal to symbolic continuum suggested that the bifurcation of literal and figurative failed to address the multi‐levels of meaning found in messages. Barthes (1964/1985) distinguished between at least three message types: the literal, the figurative, and the ideological (also see Barthes and Havas, 1976/1985). Most scholarship remained within the literal realm. For instance, Tannen and Saville‐Troike (1985) leaned toward study­ ing relative literal silence (as suggested above a purely literal silence would be the absence of any noise/sound). Habermas (1984), on the other hand, focused primarily on the phenomenon as figurative, especially as ideological. But the studies need not be confined to an either/or distinction. For example, award‐winning author, Maya Angelou’s (1969) book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, told her story of relative literal silence following sexual trauma. While she literally did not speak, this book is symbolic of women’s figurative silence, as well. It represents both the literal and the figurative simultaneously. Lindsley’s (1999) work provides another example. In a Mexican maquiladora, the owner literally banned speaking by the workers from the time they entered the factory until they left at the end of the day. The owner feared that if the workers spoke to one another, they would do so in order to form a union. Thus, he literally silenced conversation and figuratively silenced the workers’ ability to unionize. As seen above, silence may be situated on a continuum from literal to figurative, which might bring to mind the image of a straight line with opposites on either end, but by bending the line and allowing the two ends to meet, that is, the opposites touch, a circle has been created. Now, one might imagine multiple circular continua (i.e., multiple continuums) in a three‐ dimensional model, a sphere with many vectors (see Figure 30.1).

Silence 429 This sphere allows particular points to be in simultaneous positions and in opposition. The concept might be thought of as dialogic (in conversation with one another) or in a dialectical relationship (oppositional or complementary). Even this image may be a bit too linear for postmodernists as the sphere can shift, collapse, or change shape. In the social world, I found my own feminist, nonreligious standpoint in contrast, and yet in unison, with that of a conser­ vative, religious male when we both left a gymnasium while girls (as young as nine years or so) danced provocatively as part of intermission entertainment at a basketball game. He and I were simultaneously sharing opposite and mutual views. Thus, this approach allows for opposing and shared perspectives to exist simultaneously. Subsequently, scholars may apply different meanings and approaches to the study of silence, especially from literal to figurative, and as simultaneous or coinciding opposites (Clair, 1994, 1998). Although grappling with the messiness of this approach may be challenging, it might also be quite revealing. This approach can also be applied to listening. In the following section, I discuss listening as a complex literal and figurative phenomenon.

Listening: A Literal and Figurative Phenomenon Hearing and listening have been distinguished by physicality versus cognitive involvement. Hearing is the physical ability to recognize sound; whereas listening is attending to and processing a message. One can hear without listening (when not giving attention to the sound) and “listen” without hearing (e.g., the hearing impaired can “listen”). However, attentiveness (or mindfulness) does not carry the prerequisite of the sound being language. For instance, much spiritual listening is to nature. As Carbaugh (1999, p. 250) observed: Blackfeet “listening” is thus a highly reflective and revelatory mode of communication that can open one to the mysteries of unity between the physical and spiritual, to the relationships between natural and human forms, and to the intimate links between places and persons, all the while providing protection, power, and enhanced knowledge of one’s small place in the world.

Jaksa and Stech (1978) explored silence and listening in a spiritual context. Their research, undertaken at a monastery, focused more on silence and conversation, but at least one inter­ view provided some insight into listening. In 1969, a new rule allowed Trappist monks to have brief communication with one another. Jaksa and Stech (1978) examined how the monks bore the life of silence and how (in)effective their communication might be with(out) conversation. Even though the silence had provided intense reflective ability, listening to one another’s needs became easier with speech, with the majority of the monks (91%) reporting having a better understanding of their fellow monks. While the above examples refer to literal listening, figurative listening also exists. Barthes (1976/1985) suggested that listening, distinct from hearing, had two additional message levels. The second level beyond the physiological is that of “deciphering” (p. 245). This fits with conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, but also allowed for a spiritual form of listening, like mindfulness. It also incorporated a spiritual aspect. Barthes suggested that “listening brings two subjects into relation” (p. 251) and bonds people in the sense that “listening to the voice…of the Other…their way of being, their joy or their pain, their condition” connects humankind (p. 251–252). The third level of listening, according to Barthes, is: what is listened for is no longer the possible (the prey, the threat, or the object of desire which occurs without warning), it is the secret; that which, concealed in reality, can reach the human consciousness only through a code, which serves simultaneously to encipher and decipher that reality. (p. 249)

430 Clair This silent message refers to the ideological message – the message that is both absent and present. Most notably explored in various critical, feminist, and postmodern forms of schol­ arship, it is less commonly studied by ethnomethodologists who lean toward studying the literal forms.

Ethnomethodology, Linguistics, and Conversation Analysis Garfinkel (1967) argued that society was not so much a handing down of norms and rules from society at large, but rather a constantly negotiated action from the everyday conversa­ tions of participants. As such, everyday talk in the form of conversations reflects relationships and builds social structures. Talk between people would/could establish relations of domi­ nance and submission within interpersonal relationships (e.g., Dillard, Solomon, & Palmer, 1999), patterns that not only reflect the organization of conversation but also the organization of society (Sachs, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974). Conversational analysis (CA) explores the details of everyday talk in interaction. Focusing on the most minute aspects of language, these scholars address language as the combination of sound units called phonemes and morphemes, as well as the structure of conversations. Phonemes are sounds without meaning. Morphemes are small units of sound, possibly part of a word, which has meaning. For instance, in English, “um” does not have inherent meaning, but “un” does have meaning. For conversation analysts, “ums” can be an important conversa­ tional marker. It may not inherently mean anything, but use of a single or multiple ums might have meaning as a structural device, perhaps to hold one’s turn in the conversation, to indicate one is not finished, or that one is still thinking. For conversational analysts, silence between phonemes, morphemes, words, and sentences generally is considered to be without meaning, like a soundless phoneme. Silence, like pitch or tone, was considered prosodic, in the early days of CA. Sachs, Schegloff, and Jefferson’s research (1974) hinted at the possibility that silence might be more than the absence of words, which encouraged others to study turn‐taking as possibly more significant than first imagined. For instance, Davidson (1984) examined responses to unexpected silence which were followed by alterations in a request or a suggestion, which suggested a particular way of listening or attending to the silence. Tannen (1979, as cited in Tannen, 1987) studied stylistic prosodics and this work set the stage for further analysis in this area.

Prosodic Stylistic and Structural Contributions Tannen’s (1979, as cited in Tannen, 1987; 1984) classic study of a Thanksgiving dinner conversation among graduate students from various cultural backgrounds highlighted how culture contributed to conversational style and to the interpretation (based on participants’ listening) of such styles, including apparent and relative rapid fire questions by New York speakers as well as apparent and relative extended pauses by non‐New York speakers (i.e., silence and listening). The two distinct cultural groups of speakers assigned meaning and inter­ preted the styles according to their own cultural background. Tannen addressed two main findings: First, that the New York style of rapid firing of questions was natural and expected for New Yorkers by New Yorkers and disconcerting to the non‐New Yorkers; and second, the exaggerated expressions the New Yorker’s intended to be supportive of the speaker’s comment were taken as an assault on the credibility of the non‐New Yorkers (e.g., in today’s parlance, “No way!” meant to be adding support and emotional passion for what the speaker has just said by New York speakers would be taken as a challenge to the truthfulness by non‐New Yorkers – although the non‐New Yorkers may be a very broad generalization here).

Silence 431 One can immediately see how this may contribute to various forms and perceptions of speakers as listeners as well. Non‐New Yorkers might wonder if New Yorkers really listen because they talk fast, loud, quickly and overlap, while New Yorker’s might wonder if non‐ New Yorkers are listening as they seem less interested, involved, and enthusiastic. The point that Tannen (1984) made is that the linguistic style alone can result in misinterpretation, unfair judgments, and possible conflict, regardless of the content. As seen in the following section, Tannen’s classic work led the way for others to study linguistic silences and listening across cultures.

Extending Literal and Figurative Silence and Listening Roberts and her colleagues explored the role of silence in conversation with specific attention to perception, timing, and cross‐cultural variations (see Roberts & Francis, 2013; Roberts, Francis, & Morgan, 2006; Roberts, Margutti, & Takano, 2011; Roberts & Norris, 2016). In an early study, the participants (111 undergraduate English speaking college students) ­listened to conversations that varied in pitch, and the duration of the silence, across two speech acts (requests and assessments). The results suggested that the longer the silence, the more participants perceived an unwillingness for the conversational partner to comply with the request, and/or to agree with the assessment. In short, the authors reported that “silence cues,” which the authors thought were “apparently, ambiguous,” were perceived as “trouble” by the participants (Roberts, et al., 2006, p. 1079). A follow‐up study by Roberts and Francis (2013) tested the tolerance of the silent pause before a negative assessment occurs. The care­ fully designed study controlled for numerous variables and set the silent gaps to range from 200 to 1200 milliseconds. Their findings suggested that the listener/participant developed a significant perception of “reluctance” or trouble at an approximately 700–800 millisecond gap (p. 475). Roberts and her colleagues (2011) later tested perceptions of silence for intercultural var­ iation across American English, Italian, and Japanese speakers. The studies, which took place in the respective native speakers’ countries, supported earlier findings – the longer the silence the more reluctance is perceived. However, Italians felt the reluctance much earlier than most American English speakers, reporting trouble with the shortest gap. English speakers remained around the 700–800 ms mark, while Japanese participants seemed the most tolerant of the silence, reporting unwillingness perceptions at approximately 1200 ms. It should be noted that the speech acts were generally requests or assessments, and the interpretations were limited as well. The reason for the cultural differences across countries is unclear. More recently, Roberts and Norris (2016) explored gender perceptions. Using a mixed fac­ torial design and using the four basic gender identity pairings, with three different pause times (0, 600, and 1200 ms) the researchers looked at perceptions of silent pauses (i.e., listening). In general, the authors found that silence, when defined as lag time, gave meaning to the response by valuating the lag time before the second speaker responded. They also found gender played a significant role in tolerance for any lag time – females were generally judged more unwilling to help (i.e., provide a ride) even at under 0 lag time. The authors discussed this in light of gender stereotypes and expectancies of females to be compliant and willing to help. However, these findings may be confounded by gender, cultural stereotypes, and the task at hand. Nevertheless, these studies support notions that silence contributes to listener’s judg­ ments, perceptions, and meaning or meta‐meaning of response. They also suggest that cultural and gender groups may listen differently to the silence. Uryu (2009) expanded on these and Tannen’s (1984) work, to address not only personal/ cultural style, but also the “ideological and historical elements” of interpreting others in

432 Clair conversation (p. 1). Uryu’s work turns theoretically to critical postmodernism and postcolo­ nialism and combines CA with critical discourse analysis, where text and context are insepa­ rable when determining interpretations. Uryu’s dissertation, while generally similar to Tannen’s Thanksgiving dinner, differed in that it utilized non‐American participants (e.g., Japanese, Russian, German, etc.); otherwise, it is quite similar. During the course of the Thanksgiving dinner only minor conversational problems existed until a series of controversial statements and topics (e.g., the new Pope’s role in the former Nazi regime, post war Germany, Russia’s role in freeing Jews during WWII) mixed history and ideology into the talk and ­created a volatile conversation among participants, which affected the relational harmony ­initially experienced by the group. In exploring the conversation, Uryu (2009) listened literally as well as figuratively as she noted when she had accidentally insulted people, tried to save face for others, calmed the conversation, and even attempted to bring it back to harmony. But she failed to restore the original harmony, and the dinner conversation, which was meant to foster intercultural goodwill, digressed into one of blaming a shared enemy – Americans. Uryu explained that one must consider the generally masked, forgotten, or silenced histories and ideologies that are brought to the table (literally and/or figuratively) in order to make sense of the differ­ ences between people. The two areas of research discussed here extended the work of ethnomethodologists, cultural linguists, and conversational analysts. Roberts and colleagues pursued the silent pauses for gendered meanings, but remained relatively near the literal aspects of silence and listening in their experimental studies. Uryu explored the extreme side of silence as she focused more heavily on the deep cultural aspects and the content than on the prosodic, although she did indeed assess specific figurative silence and listening conversational prosodics.

Silence and Listening: The Micro‐macro and Literal‐figurative Typologies Several typologies and/or systems of organization regarding silence, and in some cases, listening, have been proposed. I briefly review two: The first, developed by Saville‐Troike (1985), draws on the cultural linguistic school, while the second, advanced by Acheson (2007, 2008), relies on the dialectical approach. The former is more literal; the latter is more figurative.

A Linguistic Typology for Silence

Bruneau (1973) and Jensen (1973) asserted that silence takes different forms and functions in significant ways. Influenced by Bruneau’s and Jensen’s early work, Saville‐Troike (1985) wrote, “Most of the existing research literature on silence is devoted to short silences (pauses) within discourse or at turn‐taking boundaries in conversation, while only a marginal amount of data is available on longer silences and their communicative significance” (p. 15). All three scholars explored multiple functions of silence and noted that silence can be either positive or negative. Their work agreed that silence communicates and can have powerful effects on peo­ ple. Jensen summarized the approach: Silence links or separates people in relationships, informs or hides information, reveals guilt or noble innocence, asserts judgment or acts as defiance at the personal or ideological and macro‐level (e.g., the civil rights movement), and activates people even though that activity may be perceived as either engaged or not (e.g., passive silence). Silence is perceived differently (or not) at times across cultures and even within cul­ tures. And it has shared meanings across and within cultures depending on the situation. Saville‐Troike (1985), however, also focused her model on the micro to macro situations or contexts of silence, which is to say she continued the linguistic tradition of privileging the literal side of silence while still invoking a few status differentials. For example, she began with the macro, “Institutionally‐determined silence” described as “locational: temples,

Silence 433 libraries” where one is not supposed to talk, and includes “rituals,” “religious groups,” “hierarchical/structural,” and “taboo” situations in which one or the other has proscribed silence (p. 16). In other words, she portrayed institutional silence as literal, rather than as possibly ideological, and framed each as cultural rules. She worked her way toward the micro via “Group‐determined silence…Individually‐determined/negotiated silence” and finally to “Noninteractive” silence, which is meditative or passive silence (p. 17). This model extended the linguistic approach – from interpersonal conversational exchanges in which pauses and turn taking were at the center of studies – to allow for other contexts, if not more figurative approaches. Saville‐Troike’s model could be developed to explore the various forms and functions of listening, especially if the literal were to be extended to the figurative form. Research questions might address: ●●

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At the macro‐societal level (e.g., social movements): Whether violent protest is a response to apathetic listening, refusal to listen, ignorant or naïve listening, or even an outright ­dismissive and/or punitive form of listening by those holding the power. At the macro‐organizational level: What forms does listening take for institutional racism or sexism? At the group level: Whether “groupthink” (Janis, 1971/1997) is dependent on a figurative form of listening in which one turns off, so to speak, the critical ear, and listens with favor­ itism for one’s own group. At the interpersonal level: How people listen to silence (silent pauses; e.g., Roberts and colleagues) and how both friends and researchers listen in ideologically‐charged situations (Uryu, 2009).

At the level that Saville‐Troike named “noninteractive” (e.g., meditative) silence, could listening exist at both mindful and meditative aspects as well as in a “mindless” or “zoned out” sort of way? People might simultaneously listen in a spiritual and meditative way to nature while they simply ignore contrary sounds or talk. This is what Barthes (1976/1985) discussed under “deciphering” (p. 245) – the second level of listening – a spiritual listening that goes beyond the basic level of interpretation. With respect to Ratcliffe’s (1999, 2005) theory of listening and identification, perhaps listening and identity (slightly different from identification) should be explored.

A Dialectical Model for Silence

Influences for a dialectical model of silence stretch from Picard (1948/1952) to my own work (Clair, 1998). Picard provided scholars with a scholarly reference point for the simultaneous opposite of silence and speech. Clearly situating silence on an equivalent rung with speech, Picard wrote: Speech came out of silence, out of the fullness of silence. The fullness of silence would have exploded if it had not been able to flow out into speech.… There is something silent in every word, as an abiding token of the origin of speech. And in every silence there is something of the spoken word, as an abiding token of the power of silence to create speech (p. 24)

This work on silence and others drove me to develop a theory of the origin of silence and language (e.g., speech, gesture, nonverbal) arising in the same moment, coinciding, simultaneously (Clair, 1998). Although grounded in the dialectic, I did not argue for a dialectical model to frame or organize theories of silence, instead moving the theory toward under­ standing the marginalization of groups of people through privilege or abandonment. While the book, Organizing Silence, focused heavily on figurative forms of silence, it concluded with

434 Clair an example of both literal and figurative silences expressed during a silent march on behalf of the marginalized/silenced. As mentioned, Acheson’s (2007, 2008) dialectical approach suggested that one way of organizing a discussion of silence was to draw upon dialectical models so that the and/both rather than either/or would surface. Eschewing the polarized conceptualizations of silence, she suggested that “as a consequence of this binary thinking, scholars remain unable to study the full range of the meanings and uses of silence” (2008, p. 535). Taking a dialectical approach, she suggested three pairings in particular as important to moving the field forward; “Silence as both good and bad. Silence as both power and lack of power. Silence as the absence of speech and speech as an addition to silence [emphasis in original].” Using the dialectical model allows for infinite pairings to be added to the model, but the infinitude of pairings can be overwhelming. Martin and Nakayama (1999) offered six dialec­ tics for studying culture, while Acheson’s (2007) offered three dialectics for studying silence. This tendency toward privileging some couplets over others could be overcome, but would be difficult and may require a very different dialectical model as seen in one that embraces an open “field” as described in Clair (1999, p. 283) or the three‐dimensional spherical vector continua mentioned earlier. Various models might be developed to run parallel to those that already exist for studying silence and/or for studying listening. But if scholars heed the recommendations of Acheson (2007) and Berger (2011), they will seek ways to meld the models to study both through the same framework. Such typologies will need to be cognizant of the literal and figurative as well as the positive and negative valences that have been associated with both silence and listening (Barthes, 1964/1985). The political and ideological are important to listening. As Barthes (1976/1985) noted “freedom of listening is as necessary as freedom of speech” (p. 260). Incorporating skills with ideological features as some of the recent theories and studies are beginning to do might offer boundary‐spanning theories of silence and listening.

Positive Approaches and Future Directions in Studies of Silence and Listening Much of the previous work on silence focused on the negative forms and functions of silence, such as giving the silent treatment (relatively literal) or the silencing of people (relatively figu­ rative). Recently, however, scholars have been exploring the positive side of silence and listening. For instance, chapters in Malhotra and Rowe (2013) address the multi‐faceted, complex nature of silence. My own chapter focused on the Warramunga of Australia (Clair, 2013), examining one woman’s story from an anthropological study conducted in 1912. This story has been interpreted and presented on several different occasions by different authors as an example of resistance (e.g., Clair, 1998; Daly, 1973; Durkheim, 1915/1976). I discovered that the extended silence could have several interpretations. A common ritual among the Warramunga was to impose silence upon a widow for a time of two years following the death of her husband. If the woman wished to remain silent longer, then she could do so. One woman remained silent for 25 years (Spencer & Gillen, 1912). This short anecdote has been interpreted by modern feminists (myself included) as a silent form of resistance (that the woman was saying, “I’ll speak when I choose to do so”). The woman’s silence can be interpreted as both oppression and resistance simultaneously (Clair, 2013; also see Clair, 1986, 1994, 1998). But a more positive focus could lead her silence to be inter­ preted as, I loved my husband so much I will honor him with 25 years of silence. Upon further review, I realized that the woman may have been providing herself a place of “sanctuary” through her silence (Clair, 2013, p. 89). The sanctuary would allow her to grieve

Silence 435 in an extended fashion or resist the norms of the tribe if that is what she had chosen to do. Other details suggested that this silence may have provided a reprieve from work or liberation from a societal norm of betrothal. Other chapters in Malhotra and Rowe’s (2013) book also focus on the positive side of silence, encouraging “feminist reflections at the edges of sound” (p. 1), promoting “listening” to the stories of self and others. For instance, Acheson (2013) addressed the silences found surrounding addiction. Interviewing and listening to individuals who sought help through Al‐Anon, she turned her story and their stories/words into poetry, as a way to make the reader listen in a different way. Representing literal and figurative forms of silence, Acheson (2013) translated the words into three main metaphors: “fences” (p. 191), “weapons” (p. 194), and “gifts” (p. 195). Specifically, silence occurs in the families when they do not talk about “it;” in these cases, metaphorical fences are erected that keep the taboo topic out of everyday conver­ sations. Silence between the addict and the loved ones also served as a metaphorical “weapon.” However, at times, not talking about it can bring great relief. This form of silence is considered a “gift.” Thus, Acheson (2013) presented silence as both positive and negative, as both literal and figurative, as a simultaneous or self‐contained opposite (Clair, 1994, 1998). Her chapter can be translated as listening to and expressing silence (Clair, 1998). In the same collection, Malhotra (2013) wrote of the supportive side of silence that she experienced following her diagnosis and surgery for ovarian cancer. First, she described the “silence in my belly” (p. 219) as an “embodied way” of knowing silence and loss (p. 219). Second, she wrote of friends sitting with her, supporting her in silent attendance. Malhotra highlighted Spivak’s (1988) notion, which “reminds us that the other side of the equation of being able to speak is really about engaging our ability to listen and the silence necessary for that listening” (p. 220). Malhotra’s chapter raised not only the positive side of silence, but also the embodiment of silence and the connection between silence and listening. Envisioning silence and listening as embodied gives the concepts a sense of physicality that may allow for new studies to explore the dialectical of the discursive and material, as well as the literal and figurative aspects of silence and listening. Returning to a new beginning, hearing was defined as physical and listening as cognitive, but this postmodern concept suggests that listening is physical in a different way – an embodied way.

Embodied Listening and Silence The embodied silence and listening discussed crosses subdisciplines, from health and interper­ sonal communication to performance studies (e.g., Alexander, 2013; Pollock, 2013; see McRae, this volume), pedagogy (e.g., Fidyk, 2013), and social movements (e.g., Levitt, 2013; Yep & Schimanoff, 2013). More recently, embodied silence and listening has been studied in the organizational communication area as a matter of ethics. Specifically, Bisel (2018) explored the language‐use of supervisors, suggesting that embodied moral knowing – using metaphors of the body to connect with how one might make moral choices – could help bring about organizational cultures that encourage healthy ethical under­ standings and actions. These embodied metaphors of morality include “involving the gut, heart, insides, instincts [and] intuitions” (p. 245). Bisel and Adame (2019) further explored the hypotheses that subordinates who perceived their supervisor as speaking in an embodied fashion rather than an intellectually reasoned fashion would (i) be more likely to label a ­questionable request as unethical; and (ii) report less anxiety in speaking up about such a matter. They tested their theory with 312 participant‐employees. Compared to those not assigned, employees assigned to the embodied speaking supervisor condition were signifi­ cantly more likely to report speaking up and less likely to report feeling anxious about speaking up about the perceived hypothetical immoral action.

436 Clair Embodied listening is coupled with literal language choices in a complex way that Bisel and Adame (2019) linked to both mind and body, both physical, visceral feeling and to mental processes. Their contributions combine silence and listening. They explored dissent and voice. They addressed the ontology and epistemology of embodied listening and silence and speaking.

Conclusion Scholarly works on silence and listening have offered substantial contributions. Many of these contributions, perhaps unwittingly, have been organized into either a literal or a figurative framework. Ethnomethodologists originally looked at the prosodic, but more recently have expanded to include the ideological (e.g., Roberts and colleagues, 2013, 2006, 2011, 2016; Uryu 2009). Dialectical (critical, feminist, and postmodern) scholars tended toward studying the figurative, but have more recently been adding the literal dimension (Acheson, 2013). Most recently, Bisel (2018) and Bisel and Adame (2019) have moved the studies in a postmodern way, circling literal listening back to a figurative hearing through embodied discourse. These new movements in the study of silence and listening may offer unique avenues for future research. Such pursuits might enjoin various disciplines and subdisciplines as well as distinct approaches (e.g., post‐positivism to postmodernism) in an effort to bring forth new knowledge. These more expansive approaches may be challenging to undertake, but may move us toward an even more insightful and fruitful future of silence and listening research. Enjoining silence and listening, the literal and figurative as well as positive and negative ­positions could bring forth significant possibilities. “Opposites come together and from what is different rises the fairest harmony.”

Heraclitus

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438 Clair Malhotra, S., & Rowe, A. C. (Eds.) (2013). Silence, feminism, power: Reflections at the edge of sound. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Martin, J. N., & Nakayama, T. K. (1999). Thinking dialectically about culture and communication. Communication Theory, 9, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468‐2885.1999.tb00160.x Olsen, T. (1979). Silences. New York: Delta Seymour. Picard, M. (1948/1952). The world of silence (S. Godman, Trans.). South Bend, IN: Regnery/Gateway. Pollock, D. (2013). Keeping quiet: Performing pain. In S. Malhotra & A. C. Rowe (Eds.), Silence, feminism, power: Reflections at the edge of sound (pp. 159–175). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ratcliffe, K. (1999). Rhetorical listening: A trope for interpretive invention and a “code of cross‐cultural conduct.” College Composition and Communication, 51, 195–224. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/359039 Ratcliffe, K. (2005). Rhetorical listening: Identification, gender, whiteness. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Roberts, F., & Francis, A. L. (2013). Identifying a temporal threshold of tolerance for silent gaps after requests. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 133, EL, 471–477. https://doi. org/10.1121/1.4802900 Roberts, F., Francis, A. L., & Morgan, M. (2006). The interaction on inter‐turn silence with prosodic cues in listener perceptions of “trouble” in conversation. Speech Communication, 48, 1079–1093. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2006.02.001 Roberts, F., Margutti, P., & Takano, S. (2011). Judgments concerning the valence of inter‐turn silence across speakers of American English, Italian, and Japanese. Discourse Processes, 48, 331–354. https:// doi.org/10.1080/0163853X.2011.558002 Roberts, F., & Norris, A. M. (2016). Gendered expectations for “agreeableness” in response to requests and opinions. Communication Research Reports, 33, 16–23 https://doi.org/10.1080/08824096. 2015.1117437 Sachs, H., Schegloff, E. A., & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn‐ taking for conversation. Language, 50, 696–735. https://doi.org/10.2307/412243 Saville‐Troike, M. (1985). The place of silence in an integrated theory of communication. In D. Tannen, & M. Saville‐Troike (Eds.) Perspectives on silence (pp. 3–18). Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Spencer, B., & Gillen, F. J. (1912). Across Australia, Vol. 2. London: Macmillan. Spivak, G. (1988). “Can the subaltern speak?” In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–315). Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Tannen, D. F. (1987). Conversational style. In H. W. Derchert & M. Raupach (Eds.), Psycholinguist models of production (pp. 251–267). Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Retrieved from https://static1. squarespace.com/static/5523f fe4e4b012b2c4ebd8fc/t/56d9c47a01dbaea476cf03ac/ 1457112186608/Conversational+Style.pdf Tannen, D. F. (1985) Silence: Anything but. In D. Tannen & M. Saville‐Troike (Eds.), Perspectives on silence (pp. 93–111). Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Tannen, D. F. (1984). Conversational style: Analyzing talk among friends. Northwood, NJ: Ablex. Tannen, D., & Saville‐Troike, M. (Eds.) (1985). Perspectives on silence. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Uryu, M. (2009). Another Thanksgiving dinner: Language, identity and history in the age of globalization. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of California, Berkeley. Retrieved from https:// cloudfront.escholarship.org/dist/prd/content/qt2qw7f7qv/qt2qw7f7qv.pdf Yep, G. A., & Schimanoff, S. B. (2013). The US day of silence: Silences and the will to unsay in the age of empire. In S. Malhotra & A. C. Rowe (Eds.), Silence, feminism, power: Reflections at the edge of sound (pp. 139–156). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Epilogue

Moving Toward Listening Literacy Andrew D. Wolvin

This Handbook of Listening is designed to showcase the extensive interdisciplinary dimensions of listening studies. Past, present, and future conceptualizations of the construct of listening have been reviewed by chapter authors. Reflecting a broad range of academic disciplines and fields of study, authors have provided detailed research and pedagogical perspectives including architecture, audiology, communication, education, healthcare, law, linguistics, management, media, music, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, public policy, and sociology. In addition, traditional boundaries of human‐to‐human (and non‐human) listening have been extended to open spaces for twenty‐first‐century digital and environmental contexts, moving us into a new era of listening theory, research, education, and practice. Clearly, as cross‐disciplinary scholars of listening, we continue to grapple with major conceptual, theoretical, and methodological issues that bear on how we understand this fascinating, challenging, interdisciplinary field. From the Greek, epilogos (επίλογος) is typically defined as a conclusion to what has ­happened in a book or play. And while I offer some commentary regarding a few themes that run through the chapters of this handbook, I do not see my contribution as “the end.” Rather, I argue that as we move forward in our understanding of the complexities of listening, it is time for us as listening scholars to situate listening as an integral component of communication literacy. In other words, this epilogue can serve as the beginning of ­listening’s newly charted course1.

The Current Status of Listening Across Disciplines Most of the chapters in this handbook comment on the status of listening within relevant bodies of scholarship, either directly or indirectly. Perhaps most directly, Lacey claims that “Media Studies – at least in its dominant Anglo‐American incarnations considered here – has rarely addressed the question of listening explicitly or in a sustained fashion” (this volume), while Aryadoust, Yuvadarshini, and Ferdinand recognize listening’s status as the “Cinderella Skill”

Segments of this epiloguechapter are adapted from a paper presented at the 2013 International Listening Association convention, Montreal, Canada.

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The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

440 Wolvin (this volume) among the more prominent language skills (i.e., reading and writing). A similar argument is made by Macnamara, who argues that while “voice” is often cited as a key ­component to building effective democracies, the role of listening to the voice of everyday citizens is rarely discussed (in academic scholarship or in public discourse). At the same time, several chapters highlight that listening is not always in the background. Musicology and Sound Studies, for instance, focus directly on how people experience music and other sounds. Similarly, Van Lengen points out that although the visual elements of space and place have dominated architecture at least since the Renaissance, the role of acoustics and sound have not always been ignored; rather, they have been key elements of design at various points in history. Indeed, sound continues to be vitally important to “promote the richness that our constructed and natural worlds can provide” (this volume), a point with which other authors would like agree (see, e.g., Sound Studies, Performative Listening). Whether listening is a central focus of scholarship or more peripheral (or even tangential) may not only depend on the specific disciplinary focus under consideration, but also what counts as “listening.” While some areas of study (e.g., Musicology, Sound Studies) explicitly use the term listening or seem to have coalesced around specific types of listening (e.g., listening comprehension, see Linguistics), other areas of study utilize what could be considered synonyms of listening. You find in Psychology, for instance, terms such as information processing and speech perception that refer to the cognitive processes responsible for comprehending and understanding language. In Management and Leadership, we are introduced to terms such as responsiveness and understanding that refer to how people perceive “being heard.” Consequently, it becomes more difficult to build a cohesive field of study with this sort of construct proliferation. These diverse ways of conceptualizing listening also lead to various operationalizations and approaches to measurement. Studying effective listening and its impact on individuals and organizations can mean exploring perceptions of another’s ability to listen, documenting specific behaviors enacted during actual interactions, or asking people exposed to a spoken message what they remember or can recall (Interpretive Approaches, Empirical Approaches). Other approaches include measuring brain activity or other physiological markers of attention (see Physiological Approaches) or exploring individual experience of sound (Phenomenological Approaches). Clearly, the ability to build a unified field of listening is made more difficult and the ability to make consistent claims about the impact of listening is hampered when scholars use the same term but with very different meanings. Of course, this brief commentary on the status of listening is the very reason this book was commissioned: To draw attention to inconsistencies, recognize patterns of similarity among these differences, and explore ways to push boundaries while appreciating the power of a centralizing construct. Indeed, as a construct, listening is unique for its ability to prompt both theorizing and application. What I propose in this epilogue is to consider a central focus that has the ability to bring together many of the themes, theories, and applications brought to light within the pages of this text. To that possible focus I offer listening literacy. While we typically think of literacy centered in the fields of reading and education, theories of literacy have been explored by scholars in virtually every discipline featured in this handbook. If, as Hobbs (2016) wrote, “literacy is fundamental to learning and cultural participation” (p. 1), then it would seem that listening literacy, particularly in the technological age in which we find ourselves, should be embraced and emphasized. Before we begin exploring this concept, however, I offer the following caveat: I bring my own personal biases as well as my research perspectives as a communication scholar to this chapter. Clearly, this epilogue would be different if written by someone from another discipline or field of study. However, I believe the proposed focus on listening literacy and competency reflects, directly or indirectly, discussions in chapters throughout the text and that it has the potential to inform research and practice.



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Listening and Communication Literacy Literacy is not a new concept. Originally rooted in oral rhetoric and persuasion, it has changed focus over the years, most notably to reading written and typeset printing, then later the ability to write using other to symbol systems (e.g., visual, digital, numeral) (Hobbs, 2016). For many, however, literacy continues to be conceptualized as “the social practices and con­ceptions of reading and writing” (Street, 1984, p. 8). Literacy theorists have attempted to reconcile the focus of literacy on written language with the need to broaden the perspective of literacy to reflect the communicative functions of language in written and oral contexts alike. Written language, suggest Hildyard and Olson (1978), can be processed over time and space, while oral language is more dependent on interpersonal functions in maintaining relationships or controlling actions (see also Pellegrini & Galda, 1998). A comprehensive theory of literacy, observed Stubbs (1980), must account “for the place of written language, both in relation to the forms of spoken language and also in relation to the communicative functions served by different types of language in different social settings” (p. 16). Hobbs’s (2016) suggestion for a move toward integrating print with visual and digital literacy is evident in the literacy theory and research over the last two decades. Selber (2004) argued that a wider perspective on literacy is needed if communicators “are going to be prepared both usefully and responsibly for writing and communication activities in a digital age” (p. 14). In calling for an expanded vision of literacy to include computer literacy, Selber urged educators to go beyond the functional literacy model (stressing basic competency reading and writing skills) to include critical literacy and rhetorical literacy so that students will become reflective producers for positive change. Or, as Tyner (1998) concluded, multiliteracies are more responsive to communication and information today: computer literacy, visual literacy, information literacy, and media literacy. Potter (2010) emphasized that media literacy is multi‐dimensional: cognitive, attitudinal, emotional, physiological, behavioral – a useful model for understanding communication literacy more broadly. Approaches to literacy have consistently centered on reading the written text, though Morris and Tchudi (1996) extended the literacy focus on “the word” to a model of basic literacy (encoding and decoding skills), critical literacy (interpreting text), and dynamic literacy (acting beyond the content and context of the text). Advances in computer technology have led educators to broaden literacy models even further to include on‐line as well as print literacy (Tuman, 1992), particularly relevant with the increasing popularity of Kindle and other computer‐based platforms for reading books. Grainger (2004) expanded literacy beyond written texts to the processing of visual and oral texts: “Spoken language is an integral dimension of literacy, since all societies are fundamentally oral…” (p. 8). And Langer (1991) noted the importance of broadening the concept of literacy to cultural conventions that impact literate thinking.

Literacy and Communication Competency Although literacy is not a term typically associated with oral communication, Hobbs’s (2016) review clearly situates listening and speaking as essential practices in early literacy education. The independent development of speech and literacy education followed the split of the Speech Communication Association from the National Council of Teachers of English in 1912. Over time, writing became the key literacy embedded in formal education. However, reading scholars eventually came to recognize that this emphasis on decoding and phonemic awareness was too narrow in scope and that reading was just one aspect of communication (Hobbs, 2016). Much of the understanding of communication literacy today derives from the communication competency model. Indeed, Work (1978) urged communication scholars to take a “comprehensive communication literacy” approach, encompassing “the full repertory of knowledge, skills, attitudes, and experiences needed to function effectively and comfortably

442 Wolvin in most communication situations” in order to understand what is required for “true, functional communicative competence in today’s world” (pp. 336, 337). Communication competency, as conceptualized by Spitzberg (1983), posits that the ­communicator needs to be both effective and appropriate. The communicator may well be effective with abilities to present an eloquent message, for example, but that message or the presentation of it may not be appropriate to the communication purpose, context, or receivers. Thus, the competent communicator is one who has the necessary tools to be appropriate and effective in order to accomplish their communication goal. The communication competency tools build on both knowledge and skills. It is not enough for a communicator to have the skills to prepare and present an effective/appropriate message. It is important for the communicator to have the knowledge as to how best to communicate their message. This background of knowledge enables the communicator, then, to know what to do and why to do it. Consequently, the competent communicator’s toolkit is both cognitive and behavioral, providing a solid conceptual foundation for the enactment of appropriate/ effective communication behaviors. The communication competency model offers a useful theoretical framework for understanding listening as a communication phenomenon more particularly. Just as speakers must be effective and appropriate, so, too, do listeners need to perform as effective and appropriate communicators. Indeed, the functions of spoken language call for communication literacy that encompasses not only the speaking communicator but also the listening communicator. We see this emphasis addressed in, for example, the chapters on Interpersonal Communication, Listening Education in the Medical Curriculum, and Linguistics. To be effective and appropriate, listeners should (i) affectively be willing to listen; (ii) ­cognitively know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it; and (iii) behaviorally apply the necessary skills to accomplish their listening communication goals. The competency perspective is a productive approach to develop meaningful instruction, assessment, and practice “of what the listener knows, does, and feels about listening communication” (Wolvin & Coakley, 1994, p. 158).

Competency and Dimensions of Listening An early inventory which breaks out these listening dimensions was derived by Halone, Cunconan, Coakley, and Wolvin (1998) in research on listening across the life span. From self‐reports of how people in different age cohorts function as listeners, the researchers identified cognitive (“I understand”), affective (“I value”), and behavioral (“I do”) characteristics of the dimensions. Interestingly, the behavioral profile factored out into three sub‐sets: verbal (“I ask questions”); nonverbal (“I look at the speaker”); and interactive (“I don’t interrupt”). What this work suggested was that like communication competency, listening competency must be expanded beyond the cognitive and behavioral dimensions. It is not enough for listeners cognitively to know what they are doing and behaviorally to function successfully. To complete the model, the affective component requires consideration. Affectively, listeners need to be willing to listen (Roberts & Vinson, 1998). To get to this level of acceptance of the role of listening communicator, the listener must value listening for what it is – an integral part of the communication process. Thus, listeners have to get beyond the passive view of the communication “receiver” to be active, engaged co‐equally in the creation of meaning with the sender. Indeed, this idea is stressed in several chapters, such as Mindful Interpersonal Listening and Musicology. And, if the concept of engagement moves beyond interactions with specific interlocutors to larger social and environmental contexts, we then see engagement addressed within the majority of chapters (e.g., Augmented Reality, Architecture, Listening for Healthy Democracy, and Sound Studies).



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Competency, Context, and Ethics In addition to the cognitive, affective, and behavioral dimensions of listening competency, it can be argued that the model should extend even further to the influence of communication context and, importantly, listening ethics. Beard (2009) suggested that competent listeners engage in ethical choices to/not to listen. Listeners always must make communication choices, so, just like speakers, listeners have ethical responsibilities in their communication decisions. Ethical listeners willingly engage in empathetic understanding with their speakers (Purdy, 1995). Johannesen, Valde, and Whedbee (2008) stressed that the listener’s ethical responsibility is to listen with reasoned skepticism (judging the soundness and the worth of the speaker’s arguments and evidence) and to approach speakers with appropriate feedback (communicating the level of comprehension and acceptance of the message). Not surprisingly, we see this perspective emphasized in the health‐related chapters, but we also see it in a range of other chapters such as Listening and Relational Lawyering, where Brooks outlines the advantages of contemplative lawyering, Performative Listening, where McRae offers up performative listening as a “purposively reflexive and ethical approach to others” (this volume), and Listening, Lying, and Deceit, where Levine argues that close listening is a key component in deception detection. As a socially constructed concept, literacy is not just a collection of technical skills but also context‐bound communicative practices (Cook‐Gumperz, 2006). Shotter (2009) encouraged listeners to enter fully into the communication surroundings and circumstances – the context. Wiemann (1978), an early advocate of attention to communication literacy, argued that scholars and educators must “with some specificity, delineate the contexts we want to consider salient in terms of literate behavior” (p. 312). Listening does not take place in a vacuum; the communication context plays a major role in the outcome of the communication. Indeed, Wiemann (1978) stressed that the competent communicator knows the cultural rules “…and uses those rules as resources to bring off the encounter in a mutually satisfying manner” (p. 315). In their review of listening theory, Bodie, Worthington, Imhof, and Cooper (2008) have observed that listening competency is context‐bound: “Not only do situational realities and constraints determine the ‘appropriateness’ and ‘effectiveness’ of behavior, but perceptions of competence also are bound by the context of a particular relationship” (p. 108). As a result, Langer (1991) argued, literacy instruction must go beyond reading and writing “to teach culturally appropriate ways of literate thinking as well” (p. 12). Other approaches to literacy also bear on the development of a functional model of listening literacy. Since so much of what a listener processes is through the visual channel, visual literacy is a key component of what makes for a literate listener. Messaris (1994), for example, delineates visual images as a unique mode of communication which requires specific cognitive abilities, aesthetic sensibilities, and responses to media manipulation. Hirsch (1987) has made a case for infusing listening instruction with cultural literacy, arguing that a literate person has to know the characteristics of their national culture that frame the processing of language. And media scholars such as Silverblatt (1995) have stressed that the pervasiveness of media and digital communication today requires listeners to have media literacy in order to choose, understand, produce, and respond to mediated communication. Tebbutt (2009) argued that to fully understand listening, we must account for “variations in context and conditions of listening” especially in today’s world of distracted listening (p. 555). There are intriguing connections between these types of literacy and emerging areas of listening studies. In the chapter, Augmented Reality, we see that augmented and virtual reality serves as both a method of study as well as an area of study, suggesting they can be used to expand our understanding of individual interactions with their environment and with others. In Sound Studies, Brounley suggests scholars explore sonic environments, technological

444 Wolvin ­mediation, and sonic experience. The idea of expanding literacy practices beyond the individual to that of collaborative, social activity has been noted by literacy researchers (Harste, 2001; Van Sluys, 2010).

Listening, Literacy, and Information Processing The collection, evaluation, and use of information are essential skills in today’s information‐ overloaded world, yet the importance of these information processing skills ought to have greater attention in human development across generations and across cultures. Listening (and even reading) should have a major role in preparing communicators to be literate processors of this information. Information literacy expands the model to the two‐way process of producing effective messages and receiving/retrieving those messages just as effectively. Information‐literate people, then, must “understand the structure, use, and evaluation of information” (Sellen, 2002, p. 125) and demonstrate “the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and communicate messages in a variety of forms” (Aufderheide, 1997, p. 79). It is significant to note that listening, as a key component of information literacy, has been identified as a critical academic skill (Conaway, 1982; McDevitt, Sheenan, & McMenamin, 1991) and as one of the most important skills in professional settings as well (Hynes & Bhatia, 1996; Maes, Weldy, & Icenogle, 1997; Waner, 1995; Willmington, 1992; Winsor, Curtis, & Stephens, 1997; Wolvin & Coakley, 1996; Welch & Mickelson, 2013). And, like educators, students share the perception that listening is a very useful skill to have (Hunt, Ekachai, Garard, & Rust, 2001). Instruction in listening has been demonstrated to increase listening skills in the corporate world (see Brownell, this volume) and in the academic world (see Lahman, this volume; Rost, this volume). Likewise, listening skills are foundational to learning skills. Williams and Eggert (2002), for instance, developed a model of college‐level note‐taking which is based on listening and processing – attending to, understanding, and connecting with the material being presented. Even a short unit on listening in the basic oral communication course can have a positive impact on student perceptions of their listening competencies (Ford & Wolvin, 1993; Ford, Wolvin, & Chung, 2000).

Assessing Competency Notably, building literacy skills in any area, suggests that such skills will be evaluated. While interlocutors naturally evaluate the communication skills of their interaction partner, more formal assessments are necessary in classroom and training contexts. For example, one college campus that has been successful in incorporating listening instruction in its ability‐based curriculum is Alverno College, a four‐year women’s college in Milwaukee. Each student is taken through a communication placement assessment in their first semester. In required communication seminars that follow their assessment and feedback session, students are introduced to Alverno’s Integrative Listening Model and given several opportunities to apply it in the classroom. The listening program also includes opportunities for students to demonstrate their listening proficiencies and to assess their growth as listeners (Thompson, Leintz, Nevers, & Witkowski, 2010). Training and assessment are not simple. As Brownell notes in her chapter, Training and Development: The Adult Learner: “Assessment…is challenging… [because] judgments of effective listening vary with the context…” (this volume). Thus, what is effective listening in the academic classroom, may or may not be effective in an organization. Further, what works for one company may not work for another.



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While many assessments focus on behavioral manifestations of listening, the best evaluations will address specified learning outcomes (for a fuller discussion, see Brownell, this volume; and Worthington & Bodie, 2018). The difficulties of assessment are addressed in a number of chapters, including Instructional Design and Assessment, Listening Education in the Medical Curriculum, and Listening and Relational Lawyering. Cognitive and affect measures are typically measured via self‐report surveys, exams, quizzes. While observational measures of actual behaviors may be more accurate measures, they can be expensive (in time and money) and often self‐report measures become the default, particularly in organizational settings. Moreover, when observational measures are utilized, they provide a brief snapshot of individual behavior at a time when those being assessed likely have a high motivation to enact specific behaviors. Thus, the best measures are longitudinal in nature, something few schools and organizations are set up to do.

Conclusion Clearly, listening ability is an important and complex dimension of oral communication literacy. Arguing that an educated person is one who listens, Cronon (1998) best articulated the need for attention to listening: “…educated people know how to pay attention – to others and to the world around them. They work hard to hear what other people say. They can follow an argument, trace logical reasoning, detect illogic, hear the emotions that lie behind both the logic and the illogic, and ultimately empathize with the person who is feeling those emotions” (p. 3). And, calling for the cultivation of listening literacy as essential to a civil society, Welton (2002) summed up the keys to that literacy: “Silence, questioning, engaging: these are the signs of listening” (p. 203). In 1949, semanticist Wendell Johnson stressed the urgency of attending to listening literacy, an urgency ever more apparent across the globe today: As the world grows more ominously voluble by the hour, the words we hurl at each other are no more confusing and maddening, or clarifying and calming, than our habits of listening permit them to be. Until they reach our ears they are mere sound waves, gentle breezes, harmless as a baby’s breath. It is through the alchemy of listening that they become transformed into the ­paralyzing and convulsant toxins of distrust and hate – or the beneficent potions of good will and intelligence (p. 9).

As interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners of the many dimensions of listening literacy, we’re taking Johnson’s challenge to promote good will and intelligence through our work. And it is encouraging that this work extends to multiple fields of study and practice on all continents. It is time, then, to center our world on listening to each other. Let’s commit ourselves to making “Thank you for listening” a predominant response across the world that has come together by listening.

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Index

Page references to Figures or Tables are followed by the letters ‘f’ or ‘t’ respectively abductive reasoning, 56 ABR (auditory brainstem response), 14, 95 academic conversation, 268–70 accelerometer technology, 80 accountability, listening with, 404–405 acoustics cues, 122 frequency, 12 origins, 77 psychoacoustics, 91 software programs, 79 and sound, 29–31, 74 active listening see also AEL (Active‐Empathic Listening) Active Listening Scale/Active Listening Observation Scale, 59 and deception, 348 in health care, 318, 320, 374 instructional design, 266, 271–2 in law, 364 and leadership, 166 listening questionnaires, 154 in music education, 293, 294 and note‐taking, 271–2 observational methods, 63 in peace‐building, 420, 421 in philosophy, 229 in psychology, 233 reporting methods, 59 adults, hearing loss in, 89, 92–3, 244 adult learners, 303, 304, 306, 307 visual span task, 244 see also training and development

AEL (Active‐Empathic Listening) Active‐Empathic Listening Scale, 59, 113 classroom settings, teaching listening in, 284 instructor behaviors, 284 interpersonal communication, 105, 111–13, 114 mindfulness, 330, 334–5 in organizations, 169 aggressiveness, verbal, 58 air conduction mechanism, hearing process, 90–1 akroasis (hearing), 31 see also hearing; hearing loss Allport, G. W., The Psychology of Radio, 182, 183 Analytical Listening (AL), 284 anatomy of hearing, 90–1 appraisal‐based comforting, 108 appreciative inquiry, 286 AR see augmented reality (AR) architecture, 71–88 ARUP Group, 78, 80 Bauhaus School, 77 International Style, 77 and listening, 81–4 and sound, 71–88 technological revolution, 78–9 visual, emphasis on, 71 Aristotle, 386 assessment of competency, 444–5 of hearing, 9, 91–2 instructional design, 275 of listening behavior, 308–309 medical curriculum, 316–18

assessment centers, 309–310 associational listening, 188 atmospheric attunements, 404 attention, physiological approaches, 15, 18 attentive listening, 111 Attitude Scale, 59 audiology, 89–101 see also hearing; hearing loss anatomy of hearing, 90–1 assessment of hearing, 9, 91–2 audiologists, 91, 92, 95 auditory processing problems, 95–6 auditory rehabilitation, 91 auditory training, 96 compensatory strategies, 96 electrophysiologic tests, 95 environmental modifications, 95–6 hyperacusis, 97 loss of hearing, 92–4, 97–8 non‐speech tests, 95 tinnitus, 97 audioposition, 188 auditory brainstem response (ABR), 14, 95 auditory processing problems, 94, 95–7 Auditory Scene Analysis, 32 auditory scene analysis, 236 auditory system, mapping, 11–12 auditory training, 96 augmented reality (AR), 409–417 aural design, 85–6 autoethnography, 47 autonomic nervous system (ANS), and pupillometry, 17

The Handbook of Listening, First Edition. Edited by Debra L. Worthington and Graham D. Bodie. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

450 Index backchanneling, 105, 329 Bakhtin, M. M., 36, 37 Barker, L. L., 243 Bavelas, J. B., 65, 105, 106–107, 111 Bickford, S., The Dissonance of Democracy, 387 big data, 48, 140 journal bursts, 147t keyword bursts, 148–50t publication bursts, 146t binaural listening, 190 blind people, 30 Bloom, B. S., 308 Bodie, G. D., 3, 36, 56, 58, 62, 64, 65, 104, 110, 111, 243, 284, 329, 353, 387, 413, 419, 420, 443 Sourcebook of Listening Research, 59 body see also embodiment embodiment and musicality, 31–3 listening with and to, 403 as receptor of sound, 81 bottom‐up listening skills, 272 brain see also fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging), auditory bilateral superior temporal gyrus, 12 cognitive neuroscience of music, 207–210 dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), 12, 13 dorsal stream, 12 dual‐stream model of language in, 12 Heschl’s gyrus (HG) and Heschl’s sulcus, 12 inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), 12 influence of 110 Hz frequency on, 73 left temporoparietal junction, 12 mild‐to‐anterior superior temporal gyrus, 12 posterior inferior temporal lobe (pITL), 11, 12 posterior superior temporal gyrus, 17 premotor cortex, 12, 204 primary auditory cortex (HG), 12, 14, 208 three‐dimensional images, in fMRI, 10 whole‐brain images, 10, 11 bridging inferences, 241 broadcasting, 183, 185–7 double articulation of, 187 Brooks, S. L., 5, 367, 443 Buber, M., 35, 36 dialogic listening, 112, 113 Burke, K., 362 burnout and listening, 168 CANS (central auditory nervous system), 90, 95, 98 Cantril, H., The Psychology of Radio, 182, 183

Carbaugh, D., 48, 429 Carey, J., 34 Carnegie Report, 363 case studies, 46 central auditory nervous system (CANS), 90, 95, 98 children hearing loss in, 92, 93–4 infant‐directed speech (IDS), 128 institutionalized, 128 language learning see language learning; lexical knowledge; phonemes; phonological awareness; word learning newborns, listening preferences, 121–2 socially isolated, 128 cinema, 189–90 see also Film Studies cinemeducation, 320 civility, 228, 229 Clark, H. H., 409–410 classroom settings, teaching listening in, 279–90 appreciative inquiry, 286 curiosity, developing, 286 and hearing loss, 94 higher education, 282 instructor behaviors, 284–6 note‐taking, 286 reading comprehension and listening, 280–4 K‐12 education, 280–1 strategies for optimal learning, 282–4 teacher immediacy, 284–5 teacher use of technology, 285–6 clinical handovers, health care, 376–7 CLT (Communicative Language Teaching), 152 CO (cingulo‐opercular) network, 12, 13, 18–20 co‐narrators, 106 cochlear, ear, 93, 94 cognitive ability and listening, 243 Cognitive Load Hypothesis, 98 cognitive neuroscience of music see music cognitive theory and listening, 234–42 auditory scene analysis, 236 building intention to listen, 234–5 cognitive systems, mapping during listening, 12–13 inattentional deafness, 235 individual differences, 242–4 inference generation, 241 integration of information, 240–2 monitoring perception, 236–7 organization of information, 237–40 pre‐listening phase, 235 selection of information, 235–7 theory of mind, 241–2

collaboration in‐depth interviews, 43 and interdependence, 106–107 music education, 297–8 Common Cause Theory, 98 common ground theory, 410–11 communication see also language common ground theory, 410–11 competency and literacy, 441–4 Culture‐centered Approach (CCA), 49–51 deception, 345–6 deficits in medicine, 318 dialogic models, 185 environmental, 48–9 inequalities, 50 interlistening, 36–7 interpersonal see interpersonal communication and language, 34–7 listening and communication literacy, 441 message types, 428 music education, 298 nonverbal, 35, 44, 105–106, 204 one‐way transmission notion, 386–7 public, 389 two‐way, 389 verbal, 108 Communication Studies, racist structures, 47 Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), 152 competencies assessing, 444–5 context and ethics, 443–4 development of listening competence, 304–305 and dimensions of listening, 442 literacy and communication competency, 441–4 comprehension building of, 267–8 experience‐text‐relationship (ETR) method, 267 “K‐W‐L” model, 267 language, 12 listening comprehension see listening comprehension (LC) quality questioning, 268 Question‐Answer‐Relationship (QAR), 268 reading see reading “reciprocal teaching” (RT), 267 second language, 152–4 Conceptual Listening (CL), 284 Conquergood, D., 46–7, 402 consonants, speech sounds, 91–2 conversation analysis (CA) extending literal and figurative silence and listening, 431–22 stylistic prosodics, 430–1

Index 451 conversations see also conversation analysis (CA) academic, 268–70 backchanneling, 105 in‐depth interviews as, 43 everyday, 104, 105, 114, 115 final, 108–109 gaze, 105 listener behaviors, 105 correlational designs, 60 cortex, human auditory BOLD response, 10 ERPs in, 14–16 mapping of auditory and speech systems, 12 primary auditory cortex (HG), 12, 14, 208 tonotopic, 11–12 Couldry, N., 387, 388, 390 Why Voice Matters, 386 creativity dramatic and literary arts, 320 music education, 298 and performance, 164–5 cross‐sectional reporting designs, 59 cues acoustic, 122 in‐depth interviews, 43 emotional, 106, 107 folk deception, 343 interpersonal communication, 105, 106, 107, 114 judgments of deception, 343–4 language learning, 122, 124, 125, 128 nonverbal, 105, 106, 107 paralinguistic, 93 pragmatic, 114, 125 prosodic, 124 utility of, 344–5 verbal, 107 cultural factors see also interpretive approaches barriers to listening in organizations, 170–1 culture industry, 185 dance music, 206 in‐depth interviews, 43 ethnography and listening, 42–3 focus groups, 45 indigenous communities, listening to, 47, 48 mattering, notion of, 49 Culture‐centered Approach (CCA), 49–51 curiosity developing, 286 listening with, 402–403 curriculum medical, 315–26 music education, 292–5 customer service representatives (CSRs), 356

dACC (dorsal anterior cingulate cortex), 12, 13 data collection and analysis big data, 48 interpretive approaches, 45, 46 lack of data integration, 390 in organizations, 169 pupillometry, 18 deafness, 33, 71 inattentional, 235 deception, 341–51, 443 decolonizing methodologies, 49 deductive reasoning, 56 deep listening, 32–3 deliberate practice, 272, 273–4t, 274–5 delta rhythm, phase coherence measures, 17 dementia and hearing loss, 98 democracy, 385–95 ancient Greece, 385–6 “architecture of listening,” 390–1 and Brexit, 385 costs of failure to listen, 392–3 democratic deficit, 386 listening systems, 391 meaningful engagement and democratic participation, 390–2 organizational listening, 387–90 participation, 385 voice and “speaking up,” 385–6 work of listening, 391–2 depth processing, 107 design considerations see also architecture architecture, 71–2, 78, 85–6 auditory fMRI, 10–11 aural and visual design, reawakening, 85–6 cross‐sectional reporting designs, 59 ex post‐facto/correlational designs, 60 instructional design and assessment, 275 longitudinal reporting designs, 59–60 pre‐experimental designs, 61 pupillometry, 18–19 quasi‐experimental designs, 61, 65 reimagining design process, 85–6 true experimental designs, 61 dialogic listening, 112–13, 429 dialogic performance, 400–401 diary writing, 47 dichotic listening studies, 15 dichotic tests, 95 dictation, 272 didactic instruction, music, 293 digital storytelling, 43 dimensional listening, 188 Dobson, A., 386, 387 Doppler effect, 31

ear and acoustics/sound, 29–30 cochlea, 93 ossicular chain, 91 outer, middle and inner, 90, 91, 207 stapes, 91 tympanic membrane, 91 ECHO Listening Profile, 284 echolocation, 30 EEG (electroencephalogram), 13, 18, 20, 210, 244 electrophysiological approaches, 13–17 ABR measures, 14, 95 ERP measures, 14–16 phase coherence measures, 14, 16–17 signal analyses, 13–14 tests, 95 embodiment see also body embodied mind theory, 203 embodied solidarity, 51 listening with and to the body, 403 moral knowing, 435 and musicality, 31–3 and performance, 46–7 silence and listening, 435–6 Emotional Intelligence (EI), 320 emotions appraisal‐based comforting, 108 emotion regulation theory, 330–1 and music, 203–210 hermeneutic approaches, 203 neuroscience, 208–209 psychological approaches, 204–205 nonverbal cues, 106, 107 empathic listening see active listening; AEL (Active‐Empathic Listening) empathy see also AEL (Active‐Empathic Listening) active‐empathic listening, 58 health care, empathic listening in, 378–9 process model of active‐empathic listening, 333–5 and quality listening, 111–12 role of listening for, 225–6 versus sympathy, 224 empirical approaches, 55–68 paraphrasing, 56 employment see workplace engaged listening, 111 environmental communication, 48–9 acoustics and environment, 30 erasure, listening as, 41, 49–51 ERPs (event‐related potentials) auditory, in the cortex, 14–16 “deviant,” 14 dichotic listening studies, 15 M/P50 component, 15 M100/N1 component, 15

452 Index ERPs (event‐related potentials) (cont’d) N200 component, 16 N400 component, 15–16 NI‐P2 cortical response, 15 P600 component, 15–16 signal analyses, 13–14 ethics, 217 ethnographic studies, 42–3, 48 Anishinaabe elders, 48–9 autoethnography, 47 Blackfeet Native Americans, 48 ethnographies of listening, 42–3 ethnography as listening, 42 and focus groups, 45 impossibility of listening, 42, 50 translation, 42, 43 ethnomethodology, 436 event‐related potentials (ERPs) see ERPs (event‐related potentials) experience‐text‐relationship (ETR) method, comprehension building, 267 extended listening, 274 face, of the other, 35–6 Facilitation Listening Scale (FLS), 171 fetal learning, 122 figurative silence, 428 see also silence and listening Film Studies, 189–90 see also Media Studies documentary film making, 43 and sound, 256–7 final conversations, 108–109 first language (L1), 139, 140, 150 see also second language (L2) direct instruction, 275 listening comprehension see listening comprehension (LC), co‐citation review method Five‐Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ), 331 Five Habits of Cross‐Cultural Lawyering, 364 “FlashSonar” (echolation), 30 fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging), auditory, 9, 10–13, 19, 21, 210, 244 focus groups, 45–6 frequency, 29, 73, 80 hearing assessment, 91–2 thresholds, hearing in, 92 Gadamar, H.‐G., 36, 402 gaze aversion, 344 gaze, in interpersonal communication, 105 gestures, 35, 204 Goh, C. C. M., 145, 153, 154–5 grounding, constraints for, 410–11 Habermas, J., 428 Halone, K. K., 109–110, 442 health and listening, 47–8

health care see also medical curriculum active listening, 318, 320, 374 auscultation, 377 challenges to listening in, 377–9 clinical environments, 376–7 clinical handovers, 376–7 empathic listening in, 378–9 listening as a therapeutic tool, 373–6 patient‐centered care, 373 situation awareness, 376 hearing see also hearing loss air conduction mechanism, 90–1 anatomy of, 90–1 assessment, 9, 91–2 central auditory system, 90 disorders, history of, 91 and listening, 89–90, 234, 292, 429 optimal, 201 outer, middle and inner ear, 90 peripheral system, 90, 94 process of, 90–1 self‐report, 9 study of, 91–5 hearing aids, 94 hearing loss see also deafness; hearing in adults, 92–3 age‐related, 92–3, 244 amplification devices, 94 in children, 92, 93–4 cognitive impairment, 98 conductive, 92 degree of, 92, 93 dementia risk, 98 noise exposure, 91 noise‐induced hearing loss (NIHL), 93 prevalence, 89 sensorineural, 92, 93, 94 treatment, 94–5 types, 92 undiagnosed, 97–8 Heidegger, M., 27, 28 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 30 hermeneutic analysis, music, 203 Herzog, H., 184 higher education, 282 Hume, D., 223, 225 humility, intellectual, 227–8, 229 Hunt, L., 320 HURIER listening model, 279 training and development, 5, 303, 305–306, 308, 310 Husserl, E., 28, 31, 35 Logical Investigations, 27 hyperacusis, 97 I‐Thou relation (Buber), 35 ideological message, 430 IDPs (internally displaced peoples), 423 IDS (infant‐directed speech), 128

IFG (inferior frontal gyrus), 12 Ihde, D., 30, 31, 34, 403 Listening and Voice, 33 Imhof, M., 282, 285 immersion and presence, 411–12 impossibility of listening, 42, 50 in‐depth interviews and focus groups, 45 listener, 43–4 in organizations, 169 person listened‐to, 44 relational context, 44 indigenous communities, listening to, 47, 48 individual differences cognitive ability and listening, 243 life span, listening across, 243–4 listening styles, 58 personality and listening behavior, 242–3 inductive reasoning, 56 infant‐directed speech (IDS), 128 inference generation, 241 information see also cognitive theory and listening bimodal, 123 integrating, 240–2 lexical‐syntactic, 129 music information retrieval (MIR), 209–210 mutual information (MI), 141 organizing, 237–40 processing of and literacy, 444 prosodic, 122 selecting, 235–7 social, 238–40 informational listening, 188 inner ear, 90 inner speech, 34–5 instructional design, 265–78 active listening, 266, 271–2 pedagogic principles, 265–7 Integrative Listening Process Model, 321 intellectual virtues, 226–30 civility, 228, 229 defining, 226 humility, 227–8, 229 and listening, 228–30 open‐mindedness, 227 intentionality and listening, 27–9 ethnographic research, 42 interdisciplinarity, potential pitfalls, 260–1 Interleaved Silent Steady State (ISSS) method, 11 interlistening, 36–7 International Association for Public Participation, 385 International Journal of Listening, 2, 65 International Listening Association (ILA), 2

Index 453 interpersonal communication see also conversations Active‐Empathic Listening (AEL), 105, 111–13 benefits for the speaker, 114–15 collaboration and interdependence, 106–107 difficulties for the listener, 114–15 everyday conversations, 104, 105, 114, 115 final conversations, 108–109 forms of interpersonal listening, 107–114 interactive coping, 106 interactive process, 104–105 and listening, 103–119 defining, 104–107 dialogic, 112–13 good quality, 111–12 mindful, 113 optimal, 112–14 relational, 109–111 required, 107–109, 192 supportive, 107–108 microsocial exchanges, 106 mindful listening, 331–2 movement between roles as speaker and listener, 104–105, 107 mundane, 104, 105, 114, 115 person‐centered emotional support, 108 pragmatic cues, 114 social support context, 108 transactional nature of listening, 106, 114 transcendence, 113–14 and trauma, 106, 108, 114, 115 verbal and nonverbal messages, 105–106 interpretive approaches, 41–54 intersensory redundancy hypothesis, 128 intersubjectivity, 35 interviews Calgary‐Cambridge Guide to the Medical Interview, 318 in‐depth, 43–4, 45 medical curriculum, 318–19 motivational interviewing (MI), 319, 374 rapport, 44 recording, 44 ISE (irrelevant speech effect), 244 ISSS (Interleaved Silent Steady State) method, 11 Itzchakov, G., 63, 111, 167, 171 Janusik, L., 104, 243, 282 Jefferson, G., 430 job satisfaction, 165–6 “K‐W‐L” model, comprehension building, 267 Kahneman, D., Thinking, Fast and Slow, 223

King‐Kopetzky Syndrome, 96 Kline, N., 368 Kluger, A. N., 63, 168, 170, 171 knowledge see also acoustics; communication; empirical approaches; experimental methods; language learning; legal professionals; medical curriculum; music education; musicology; phenomenology; philosophy; psychology acoustical, 75, 84 communication competency, 442 contextual, 348 cultural, 43, 49 experimental methods, 61 explicit vs. implicit, of music, 199–203 historical/prior, 282, 293, 297 indigenous, 47, 49 legal, 368 lexical see lexical knowledge listening as active construction, 266 local, 421 medical, 217 metacognitive, 153, 154, 281, 282 moral knowing, 435 music education, 282, 293, 297 mutual, 410 orthographic, 127 phenomenological, 28 philosophical, 217, 218, 219, 222, 223, 227 phonological see phonological awareness psychological, 224 specialist, 2 verifiable, 347 world, 152 L1 see first language (L1) L2 see second language (L2) LACE® (Listening and Communication Enhancement), 96 language and communication, 34–7 dual‐stream model, 12 learning of see language learning native, 122–4 organizing verbal input, 237–8 proto‐language, 300 as signification, 34 of signs, 32 spoken see speaking/speech as word, 34 language learning, 121–37 cognitive biases, 125 comprehension, 12 conceptual categories, 125 cues, 122, 124, 125, 128 developmental process, 124 face‐to‐face interactions, 123, 127, 128

fetal, 122 and hearing loss, 94 infant‐directed speech (IDS), 128 in infants, 122–5 literacy development and phonological abilities, 126–7 Mandarin language example, 128 maternal language, 122 mispronunciations, 125, 127 name–nameless category principle, 125 native language, 122–4 newborn, prenatal shaping of listening preferences in, 121–2, 127 non‐native sounds, loss of sensitivity to, 123 and perception, 122–4 phonemes, 126 phonological awareness, 126, 127, 153, 280 phonological forms, 124, 126–7 prosodic information, 122 rhyming abilities, 126 second language, 127 sentence boundaries, 124 sound inventories, contrasts between countries, 122 statistical learning, 124 vocabulary, 125 words see word learning law see Relational Lawyering Lazarsfeld, Paul, 183, 184 LC (locus coeruleus), 18, 20 LC‐NE (locus coeruleus‐ norepinephrine) system, 18 leadership see also organizational listening; organizations and active listening, 166 avoidance‐attachment style, 171 and listening, 168 and management, 163–79 learning and facilitation of listening adult learners, 303, 304, 306, 307 in classroom settings, 279–90 K‐12 education, 280–1 and reading comprehension, 280–4 cognitive neuroscience of music learning, 208 in higher education, 282 in law, 362–3 in medical curriculum, 315–26 integration of listening with other learning modalities, 271–2 language see language learning metacognitive interventions, 283 music see music education problem‐based learning, applying to listening training, 306–309 problems with implementing listening education, 317–18 Levinas, I., 35–6

454 Index lexical knowledge, 12, 16, 124, 125 competence, 155 lexical restructuring model, 127 lexical‐syntactic information, 129 networks, 129 life span, listening across, 243–4 linguistics, 139–61 see also co‐citation analysis (CA); listening comprehension (LC) applied, 139 and listening comprehension, 139 physiological approaches, 16, 19 silence, linguistic typology for, 432–3 Lipari, L., 36, 37, 44, 387, 402 listeners, as co‐narrators, 44 listening see also architecture; audiology; communication; hearing; hearing loss; sound architecture, 81–4 in classroom settings see classroom settings, teaching listening in cognitive systems, mapping during, 12–13 comprehension (L2), 152–4 concept of, 192, 217, 219, 230 cues see cues development of competence, 304–305 discipline of see discipline of listening as erasure, 49–51 ethnography see ethnographic studies forms, 107–114 and health, 47–8 and hearing, 89–90, 234, 292, 429 and interpersonal communication see interpersonal communication interpretive research see interpretive approaches and media see media and music see music; music education perception of, 168, 169 philosophical conceptions see philosophy physiological study see physiological approaches process of, 9, 45, 46, 112 and production of meaning, 187–9 as a skill see listening skills and speaking see speaking/speech terminology, 440 transactional nature, 106, 114 Listening Circle, 167 listening comprehension (LC) algorithms, 141 close connection between first and second languages, 139, 150–1 clusters, research author co‐citation analysis (ACA), 152 document co‐citation analysis (DCA), 151, 152

defining listening comprehension, 139 journal bursts, 147t journal co‐citation analysis (JCA), 140, 141, 145 keyword bursts, 148–50t publication bursts, 146t second language (L2), 152–4 Test for Listening Comprehension, 59 listening literacy, 440, 443 listening skills, 96, 103, 112, 152 see also instructional design; music education; training and development academic, 270 bottom‐up, 272 building of, 4, 190, 286 constructive, 168 critical, 297 deficient or lacking, 265, 320, 361 destructive, 168, 171 development, 222 effective, 166, 168–70, 322, 356, 361, 363, 369, 375, 377 enhanced, 333, 358 higher‐order, 272 improving, 154, 164, 190 integrating into curriculum, 282 measuring, 155, 171 music, 292, 293, 297, 298, 299 operational, 279 in organizations, 164, 166, 168–70 self‐regulation, 282 targeted, 265 teaching, 4, 154, 164, 190, 275, 282, 286 listening systems, 391, 393 “Listening and Thinking” measure, 296 Listening with Understanding, 169 literacy and communication competency, 441–4 development of and phonological abilities, 126–7 and information processing, 444 listening, 440, 443 phonological abilities and literacy development, 126–7 pre‐literate societies, 75 literacy development, 126–7 literal listening, 429 see also silence and listening logic/logical reasoning, 28, 56 M/EEG (magnetoencephalography/ electroencephalography), 9, 13, 17, 19, 21 McLuhan, M., 186 MacNamara, J., 5, 48, 172, 440 magnetoencephalography/ electroencephalography see M/EEG (magnetoencephalography/ electroencephalography)

MALQ (Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire), 153 mass media, 185 maternal language, 122 mattering, notion of, 49, 367 media see also Media Studies; mediated listening; technology digital storytelling, 43 documentary film making, 43 Film Studies see Film Studies “new media,” 191 social media listening, 192, 357–8, 390 melody, 202, 206, 207, 208 Merleau‐Ponty, M., 27, 28, 31, 35, 36, 37 metacognition, 153 Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire (MALQ), 153 method, listening as, 191–3 middle ear, 90 mindfulness/mindful listening, 113, 329–39 decentering, 331 describing, 331 emotion regulation theory, 330–1 Five‐Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ), 331 interpersonal listening, 331–2 language and communication, 34 and law, 366 meaning, 333–4 Mindful Active‐empathic Listening, 334–5 nonjudging, 331 nonreacting, 331 observing, 331 parenting, mindful, 332–3 process model of active‐empathic listening, 333–5 processing, 330 responding, 330 self‐other connecting in interpersonal mindfulness, 332 sensing, 330 Mindfulness‐to‐Meaning Theory (MMT), 330, 333–4, 335 MIR (music information retrieval), 209–210 mirror‐neuron systems, 204 mispronunciations, 125, 127 moral sensitivity, role of listening for, 225–6 morphemes, 237, 430 motivational interviewing (MI), 319, 374 MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging), 10, 13, 207 see also fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging), auditory music cognitive neuroscience of, 207–210 clinical applications, 209 emotions, 208–209

Index 455 learning, 208 OPERA hypothesis, 209 perception, 207–208 concrete, 32 education see music education embodiment and musicality, 31–3 emotion and meaning in, 203–210 hermeneutic approaches, 203 psychological approaches, 204–205 explicit vs. implicit knowledge of, 199–203 and geometry, 75 mediated music and listening subject, 190–1 orchestral, 76 percussion instruments, 33, 202 rhythm, 202 singing, 403 Sufi Muslim singers, ethnographical research, 42 television, listening on, 190 Western, 32 music education collaboration, 297–8 communication, 298 creativity, 298 critical thinking, 297 curriculum, 292–5 didactic instruction, 293 importance of listening in, 291–2 learning‐centered, 294–5 listening and learning, 295–8 six‐part Listening Sequence (Stauffer), 294 teacher‐centered, 293–4 music psychology, 299–300 musicology, 199–215 see also rhythm emotion and meaning in music, 203–210 ethnomusicological research and music aesthetics, 205–207 explicit vs. implicit knowledge of music, 199–203 melody, 202, 206, 207, 208 mere exposure states, 204 musical features and concepts, 200–203 performative listening, 404 sound dimensions, 201t tonality see tonality Nagarjuna (founder of Madhyameka Buddhism), 38 narrative humility, 321 Narrative Medicine, 320–1 nature, listening to, 48 neuroimaging development, 11 fMRI see fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging), auditory neurons, 13, 14, 16–18, 93 mirror‐neuron systems, 204

newborn infants aesthetic preferences, teaching, 207 listening preferences, prenatal experiences shaping, 121–2, 127 Nichols, R., 279 NIHL (noise‐induced hearing loss), 93 noise abatement campaigns, 30 “art of,” 80 background, 12 birth of, 77 broadband, 15 exposure to, and hearing loss, 91 fMRI scanners, 11 occupational, 94 and politics, 258–9 noise and politics, 258–9 noise‐induced hearing loss (NIHL), 93 nonverbal communication, 35, 44, 105–106, 204 note‐taking, 271–2, 286 OCB (organizational citizenship behavior), 165 online listening, 272 open listening, 36 open‐mindedness, 227 opening, listening as, 405–406 optimal listening, 112–14 orchestral music, 76 organization of information social information, 238–40 TRACE model, 238 verbal input, 237–8 working memory, role in, 240 organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), 165 organizational culture, 390 organizational listening, 385 organizations see also organizational citizenship behavior (OCB); workplace barriers to listening in, 170–1 commitment to, 166–7 creativity, 164–5 listening environment, 164 media, 385 organizational listening, 48, 387–90 sales context, 164 social status considerations, 170 ossicular chain, ear, 91 other, the, 35–6 outer ear, 90 parametric modeling programs, acoustics, 78–9 parenting, mindful, 332–3 Pasupathi, M., 106, 110, 111 Pavlovian conditioning, 205 peace‐building, 419–26 active listening, 420, 421 and civil wars, 423

defining, 420 in Ethiopia, 422–4, 425 and genocide, 423 and listening, 419–22 in South Africa, 421, 424 perception and language learning, 122–4, 127–9 of listening, 168, 169 monitoring, 236–7 music perception, cognitive neuroscience of, 207–208 speech, 127–9 performance, 46–7 see also performative listening creativity, 164–5, 298, 320 moment‐by‐moment improvisation, 33 and neoliberalism, 50 organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), 165 as transformative, 401–402 performative listening, 399–407, 443 see also performance with accountability, 404–405 with curiosity, 402–403 as opening, 405–406 as a relational stance, 400–402 singing, 403 peripheral auditory system, 90, 94 personality and listening behavior, 242–3 perspective‐taking listening, 109 phase coherence measures, 14, 16–17 phenomenology, 27–40 see also acoustics; philosophy; sound philosophy, 217–32 phonemes, 124, 126, 237, 240 phonological awareness, 153, 280 phonological abilities and literacy, 126–7 phonological deficit hypothesis, 126 physiological approaches, 9–26 cingulo‐opercular (CO) network, 12, 13, 18–20 electrophysiological approaches, 13–17 ERP measures, 14–16 fMRI, 10–13, 19, 21 M/EEG, 9, 13, 17, 19, 21, 207, 244 neurons, 13, 14, 16–18 phase coherence measures, 16–17 pupillometry, 17–20, 21 pitch, 12, 29, 33, 202, 204 pITL (posterior inferior temporal lobe), 11, 12 Plato, 386 Seventh Letter, 217 politics of listening, 391 positive regard, 270 Pratella, F. B., 77 pre‐listening phase, 235 pregnancy and prenatal experiences, effect on listening preferences, 121–2, 127

456 Index premotor cortex, 12, 204 presbycusis (age‐related hearing loss), 92–3 presence copresence, 183, 410–11 and immersion, 411–12 self‐presence, 411 telepresence, 411 primary auditory cortex (HG), 12, 14, 208 problem‐based learning (PBL), 307–308, 309 prosodic information, 122 proto‐language, 300 proto‐lexicon, 124 psychoacoustics, 91 psychology, 233–51 Big Five model, 242 Clinical Psychology, 233 cognitive neuroscience of music, 207–210 Cognitive Psychology, 233 cognitive theory see cognitive theory and listening Developmental Psychology, 233 General Psychology, 233 music, 204–205, 299–300 organization of information see information; organization of information personality and listening behavior, 242–3 sub‐disciplines, 233 theory of mind, 241–2 working memory, 240 pupillometry, 17–20, 21 Pythagoras, 31, 74 qualitative research, 41 quality listening, 111–12 quasi‐experimental designs, 61, 65 Question‐Answer‐Relationship (QAR), comprehension building, 268 questionnaires Five‐Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ), 331 listening comprehension (LC), 153, 154–5 self‐administered, 60 radio, 182–7 American programming, 188 television as “illustrated radio,” 190 Radio Research Project (RRP), 1937, 183 rapport, in interviews, 44 reading acquired skills, 127 Direct and Indirect Effect Model of Reading (DIER), 280 distant, 191 instructional design, 271

learning to read, 126, 127 listening seen as freedom from, 187 and online listening, 272 orthographic‐phonological representations, building, 127 reading comprehension and listening, 279–84 at classroom level, 280–4 in higher education, 282 K‐12 education, 280–1 strategies for optimal learning, 282–4 written word recognition, 127 reality see also augmented reality (AR) augmented see augmented reality (AR) virtual see virtual reality (VR) reasoning and listening, 219–22 evidentiary status, 220 normativity, 220 occurrency, 221 relational patterns, 220–1 “reciprocal teaching” (RT), 267 reciprocity, general and dyadic, 174 reduction, phenomenological, 27–8, 31, 34, 38 reflexivity, 50 rehabilitation, auditory, 91 Relational Lawyering, 366–9, 443 relational listening, 109–111 relational patterns, 220–1 Renaissance period, architecture and sound, 71, 75–6 repetition time (RT), 10 required listening, 107–109, 192 respectful inquiry, 169 rhythm, 16, 17, 33 hemiola, 205 musicology, 202, 203, 205, 208 swing, 205 syncopated, 203 Ridge, A., 105–106, 111 Rogers, C., 169, 270 Sabine’s Law, 77 Sachs, H., 430 Schaeffer, P., 30, 32, 189 Schafer, R. M., 31, 255, 256 Soundscape, 30 Treatise on Musical Objects, 32 Tuning the World, 254, 258 Schegloff, E. A., 430 Schwartz, H., Making Noise, 258 second language (L2) see also first language (L1); listening comprehension (LC), co‐ citation review method deliberate practice, 272 direct instruction, 275 listening and reading strategies for optimal learning, 283 listening comprehension, 139, 140, 150, 153, 154

secondary listening, 183 self‐administered questionnaires, 60 self‐other connecting in interpersonal mindfulness, 332 self‐presence, 411 sensorineural hearing losses, 92, 93, 94 sentence boundaries, 124 serious listening, 183 SGNs (spiral ganglion neurons), 93 signal‐to‐noise ratios see SNRs (signal‐to‐noise ratios) silence and listening, 427–38 conversation analysis (CA) see conversation analysis (CA) dialectical model for silence, 433–4 embodied, 435–6 future directions, 434–6 “silent” cinema, 190 Silverman, K., The Acoustic Mirror, 188–9 singing, 403 situation awareness, 376 smartphones, 356–8 SNRs (signal‐to‐noise ratios), 19 social information, organizing, 238–40 social media listening, 192, 357–8, 390 see also TLSM (Technological Listening and Social Media) social presence, 411 Social Relations Modeling (SRM), 172–4 sonic violence, 259–60 sonification, 191 Sophists, 386 sound acousmetre, 257 and acoustics, 29–31 and architecture, 71–88 early examples, 72–5 Greek theater, 73–4 Industrial and technological revolutions, influence of, 76–9 medieval examples, 75 pre‐literate societies, 75 Renaissance, 71, 75–6 Roman period, 74 body as receptor, 81 in cinema, 190 compared with vision, 71 compositional potential, 32 defining, 29, 30–1 metaphors, 29 parameters, 91 physical properties, 32 synchronized, 190 and technology, 256 vibrations, 33 as word, 36 sound art, influence, 79–81 Sound Box, Swiss Pavilion, 82 “Sound Lab,” 78

Index 457 Sound Lounge, University of Virginia, 79 sound studies, 253–62 film studies, 256–7 global, 257–8 interdisciplinarity, potential pitfalls, 260–1 noise and politics, 258–9 sonic violence, 259–60 soundscapes and auditory cultures, 254–60 sound waves, 9, 29–30, 93 sound writing, 42 Sourcebook of Listening Research (Worthington and Bodie), 59 speaking/speech see also conversations; voice defining voice, 386 fMRI mapping of speech system, 11–12 infant‐directed speech (IDS), 128 inner speech, 34–5 interpersonal communication, benefits for speaker, 114–15 and listening, 271 implicitly linked practices of speaking and listening, 386 movement between roles as speaker and listener, 104–105, 107 phenomenology, 36 listening is not absence of talking, 363 N400 ERP component, 16 and note‐taking, 271–2 outer speech, 34 perception, 124, 127–9 processing of, 12, 124 self‐talk, 34 speaking “floor,” 105 “speaking up” and voice, 385–6 speech stream, making sense of, 124, 125 and thought, 34–7 Speech Communication Association, split from National Council of Teachers of English (1912), 441 speech sounds, fetal learning, 122 spiritual listening, 429 spouses, conversations between, 110 SRM (Social Relations Modeling), 172–4 stapes, ear, 91 Stoever, J. L., 261 The Sonic Color Line, 187 stress patterns, speech, 122, 124 subaltern voices, 49, 50, 51 support encounters, 107–108 supportive listening, 107, 169 sympathy, 223–4 versus empathy, 224 role of listening for, 225–6

talking see speaking/speech Tannen, D., 428, 430, 431 task‐evoked pupillary response see TEPR (task‐evoked pupillary response) technology accelerometer technology, 80 aiding of listening, 391 as context, 356–8 defining technological listening, 353–4 and engagement, 48 PowerPoint slides, 285 redefining listening through, 353 as a shared context, 354–8 as a shared space, 355–6 and sound, 256 teacher use of, 285–6 technological revolution, 78–9 TLSM (Technological Listening and Social Media), 356, 357, 358 workplace, 355–6 Tefera, S., 423 telepresence, 411 television, 182, 190 TEPR (task‐evoked pupillary response), 18–20 theory see also theory of mind augmented reality (AR), 409–412 cognitive see cognitive theory and listening Cognitive Load Hypothesis, 98 dual‐process theory of the mind, 234 Mindfulness‐to‐Meaning Theory (MMT), 335 thinking first, 64–5 theory of mind, 241–2 theta rhythm, phase coherence measures, 17 “thick description” of listening practices, 42, 47 Thompson, C., 375 Thompson, E., 78, 255–6 Soundscapes of Modernity, 255 Thompson, M., 259 Beyond Unwanted Sound, 258 thought and gestures, 35 listening as a mode of, 31 and phenomenology, 28, 30, 34–7 public and social, 34 and speech, 34–7 tinnitus, 97 Tinnitus Retraining Therapy, 97 TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation), 207 toddlers, word learning in, 124–5, 126 tonality, 200, 206–208, 210 Western, 32, 210t tongue clicks, 30 tonotopic mapping, 11–12 touch, listening by, 33 TRACE model, 238

training and development, 303–313 activities, 303–304 applying problem‐based learning to listening training, 306–309 assessment centers, 309–310 assessment of listening behaviors, 308–309 creating listening environments, 310–11 development of listening competence, 304–305 future of listening training, 311–12 HURIER listening model, 5, 303, 305–306, 308, 310 improving listening effectiveness, 306–310 problem‐based learning (PBL), 307–308, 309 transcendence, interpersonal, 113–14 trauma, 36, 106, 108, 114, 115 truth, in listening, 42 tympanic membrane, ear, 91 understanding and listening, 222–6 empathy, 224 moral sensitivity, 225 sympathy, 223–4 understanding others, 223–4 United Kingdom Brexit, 385 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 185 Government Communication Service (GCS), 392, 393 Grenfell Tower fire, London (2017), 392–3 Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Public Inquiry (hospital deaths), 392 United States advertising, 182 American Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), 316 Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), 318 barriers to listening in organizations, 171 Blackfeet Native Americans, ethnographic study, 48 National Board of Medical Examiners, 316 radio programming, 188 skyscrapers, 76 “Speak Up” campaign, 386 traditional legal education, 362 Trump, election of, 385 United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE), 316, 317 Van Lengen, K., 74, 83, 440 Vandergrift, L., 145, 153, 155 Varese, E., 82

458 Index verisimilitude, 55, 190 VIII cranial nerve, 91 virtual reality (VR), 190, 409, 411, 412 see also augmented reality (AR) visual design, 85–6 Vitra Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany, 83–4 Vitruvius (Marcus Vitruvius Pollio), 74, 76 “Ideal” mode of architecture, 75 vocal cords, 122–3 voice defining, 386 of everyday citizens, 440 implicitly linked practices of speaking and listening, 386 of the people, 385 of sex workers, 50 and “speaking up,” 385–6 subaltern voices, 49, 50 voice onset time (VOT), 122–3 voice to text (VTT) software, 391 VOT (voice onset time), 122–3 vowels, speech sounds, 91 Watson, K. W., 243 Weaver, J. B., 243 Weger, H., 58, 62, 284 Weihing, J., 96 Western music, 32 Whedbee, K. E., 443

WHO (World Health Organization), 89, 126 Wolvin, A. D., 413 word learning see also reading associative word learning tasks, 125 encoding of words, 125 in infancy and toddlerhood, 124–5, 126 mispronunciations, spotting, 125, 127 phonological deficit hypothesis, 126 phonological sound structure of words, 126 speech stream, making sense of, 124, 125 written word recognition, 127 work of listening, 391–2 working memory role in organizing information, 240 verbal, 12 workplace see also leadership; organizations attitude towards one’s employer, complexity, 167 barriers to listening in organizations, 170–1 cultures, 170–1 dominance vs. prestige, 170–1 job satisfaction, 165–6 levels of analysis dyadic, 173–4 individual, 173

organizational, 172 team, 172–3 listening and burnout, 168 dyadic insights, 174 good quality, at work, 168–70 and leadership, 168 and performance, 163–5 and work attitudes, 165–8 management and leadership see leadership performance individual and organizational markers of, 163–4 and listening, 163–5 markers of, 163–4 organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), 165 Social Relations Modeling, 172, 173 and technology, 355–6 Worthington, D. L., 3, 58, 243, 285, 353, 420 Sourcebook of Listening Research, 59 writing acquired skills, 127 alphabetic writing systems, 126 diary entries, 47 instructional design, 271 learning to write, 127 and listening/online listening, 272 as performance, 47