Physiological listening

To listen is to give attention to sound or action.[1] When listening, one is hearing what others are saying, and trying to understand what it means.[2] The act of listening involves complex affective, cognitive and behavioral processes.[3] Affective processes include the motivation to listen to others; cognitive processes include attending to, understanding, receiving and interpreting content and relational messages; and behavioral processes include responding to others with verbal and nonverbal feedback.

Listening can be a useful skill for different problems, but it is essential to resolve conflict. Poor listening can lead to misinterpretations, thus causing conflict or a dispute. Other causes can be excessive interruptions, inattention, hearing what you want to hear, mentally composing a response, and having a closed mind.[4]

Listening is also linked to memory. According to one study, during a speech some background noises heard by listeners helped them recall some of the information by hearing it again. For example, when were doing something like reading or doing something else while listening to music, we can recall what that was when rehearing the music later.[5]

Listening differs from obeying. A person who receives and understands information or an instruction, and then chooses not to comply with it or not to agree to it, has listened to the speaker, even though the result is not what the speaker wanted.[6] Listening begins by hearing a speaker producing the sound to be listened to. A semiotician, Roland Barthes, characterized the distinction between listening and hearing. "Hearing is a physiological phenomenon; listening is a psychological act." [7] We are always hearing, most of the time subconsciously. Listening is done by choice. It is the interpretative action taken by someone in order to understand, and potentially make sense of, something one hears.[8]

Listening may be considered as a simple and isolated process, but it would be far more precise to perceive it as a complex and systematic process. It involves the perception of sounds made by the speaker, of intonation patterns that focus on the information, and of the relevance of the topic under discussion.[9]

According to Barthes, listening can be understood on three levels: alerting, deciphering, and understanding how the sound is produced and how it affects the listener.[10]

People listen for 45 percent of their time communicating.[11]

Alerting, the first level, involves detection of environmental sound cues. This means that certain places have certain sounds associated with them; for example, any given home. Each home has certain sounds associated with it that makes it familiar and comfortable to the occupant. An intrusion, a sound that is not familiar (e.g. a squeaking door or floorboard, a breaking window) alerts whoever lives there to potential danger.

Deciphering, the second level, involves detecting patterns when interpreting sounds; for example, a child waiting for the sound of his mother's return home. In this scenario the child is waiting to pick up on sound cues (e.g. jingling keys, the turn of the doorknob, etc.) that signal his mother's approach.

Understanding, the third level, means knowing how what one says will affect another. This sort of listening is important in psychoanalysis, the study of the unconscious mind. According to Barthes, the psychoanalyst must suspend judgment while listening to the patient in order to communicate with the latter's unconscious without bias. In the same way, lay listeners must suspend judgment when listening to others.

All three levels of listening function within the same plane, and sometimes all at once. Specifically the second and third levels, which overlap vastly, can be intertwined in that obtaining, understanding and deriving meaning are part of the same process. In this way anyone, on hearing a doorknob turn (obtaining), can almost automatically assume that someone is at the door (deriving meaning).

Active listening involves listening to whatever is being said, and attempting to understand it. It can be described in a lot of ways. Active listening requires good listening skills. The listener is attentive, nonjudgmental, non-interrupting. An active listener analyzes what the speaker is saying for hidden messages, and meanings contained in the verbal communication. An active listener looks for nonverbal messages from the speaker in order to comprehend the full meaning of what is being said.[12] In active listening, one must be willing to hear what is being said, and try to understand the meaning of whatever has been said. Multiple benefits can accrue from active listening. Being an active listener enables one to become a more effective listener over time, and strengthens one's leadership skills in the process.[13]

Active listening is an exchange between two or more individuals. When those involved are active listeners, the quality of the conversation will be better and clearer. They connect with each other on a deeper level with each other in their conversations.[14] Active listening can create a deeper, more positive relationship between or among individuals.[15]

Active listening is important in bringing changes in the speaker's perspective. Clinical research and evidence show that active listening is a catalyst in one's personal growth, which enhances personality change and group development. People will more likely listen to themselves if someone else is allowing them to speak and get their message across.[15]

Active listening allows for us to be present in a conversation. Listening is a key factor in cultivating relationships because the more we understand the other person, the more connection we create, as taught in nonviolent-communication Dharma teachings. As someone recently stated, "We should listen harder than we speak."

Along with speaking, reading and writing, listening is one of the "four skills" of language learning. All language-teaching approaches, except for grammar translation, incorporate a listening component.[16] Some teaching methods, such as total physical response, involve students simply listening and responding.[17]

A distinction is often made between "intensive listening", in which learners attempt to listen with maximum accuracy to a relatively brief sequence of speech; and "extensive listening", in which learners listen to lengthy passages for general comprehension. While intensive listening may be more effective for developing specific aspects of listening ability, extensive listening is more effective in building fluency and maintaining learner motivation.

People are usually not conscious of how they listen in their first, or native, language unless they encounter difficulty. A research project focused on facilitating language learning found that L2 (second language) learners, in the process of listening, make conscious use of whatever strategies they unconsciously use in their first language, such as inferring, selective attention or evaluation.[9]

Several factors are activated in speech perception: phonetic quality, prosodic patterns, pausing and speed of input, all of which influence the comprehensibility of listening input. There is a common store of semantic information (single) in memory that is used in both first- and second-language speech comprehension, but research has found separate stores of phonological information (dual) for speech. Semantic knowledge required for language understanding (scripts and schemata related to real-world people, places and actions) is accessed through phonological tagging of whatever language is heard.[19]

In a study involving 93 participants investigating the relationship between second-language listening and a range of tasks, it was discovered that listening anxiety played a major factor as an obstacle against developing speed and explicitness in second-language listening tasks. Additional research explored whether listening anxiety and comprehension are related, and as the investigators expected they were negatively correlated.[20]