Study Guide Comm 1500
Chapter 5: Listening and Communication
Hearing vs. listening
Hearing: sound waves generated by someone’s voice enter your inner ear, causing eardrum to vibrate. Your brain then interprets these vibrations as words and voice tone.
Listening: receiving, attending to, understanding, responding to, and recalling sounds and visual images. Involves both visual and auditory cues.
The listening process (bold terms associated)
1. Receiving: seeing and hearing constitute hearing.
Critical to listening-you cant listen if you don’t see or hear the other person
Noise pollution: sound in the surrounding environment that obscures or distracts our attention from auditory input *sources include crowds, roads and air traffic, construction equipment and music
Hearing impairment: restricted ability to receive sound input across the humanly audible frequency range.
2. Attending: devoting attention to the information you’ve received
Salience: degree to which it seems extremely noticeable and significant
To improve your attention: 1. Limit your multitasking & 2. Elevate your attention *Limit multitasking online: using multiple forms of technology at once. It erodes your capacity for sustaining focused attention *Elevating attention: 1. Develop awareness of your attention level 2. Take note of encounters in which you should listen carefully, but that seem to trigger low levels of attention 3. Consider the optimal level of attention required for adequate listening during these encounters 4. Compare the level of attention you observed in yourself versus the level of attention that is required, identifying the “attention gap” 5. Elevate your attention to the point necessary to take in the auditory and visual information your receiving Mental bracketing: systematically putting aside thoughts that aren’t relevant to the interaction at hand
3. Understanding: interpreting the meaning of another person’s
Hearing vs. listening
Hearing: sound waves generated by someone’s voice enter your inner ear, causing eardrum to vibrate. Your brain then interprets these vibrations as words and voice tone.
Listening: receiving, attending to, understanding, responding to, and recalling sounds and visual images. Involves both visual and auditory cues.
The listening process (bold terms associated)
1. Receiving: seeing and hearing constitute hearing.
Critical to listening-you cant listen if you don’t see or hear the other person
Noise pollution: sound in the surrounding environment that obscures or distracts our attention from auditory input *sources include crowds, roads and air traffic, construction equipment and music
Hearing impairment: restricted ability to receive sound input across the humanly audible frequency range.
2. Attending: devoting attention to the information you’ve received
Salience: degree to which it seems extremely noticeable and significant
To improve your attention: 1. Limit your multitasking & 2. Elevate your attention *Limit multitasking online: using multiple forms of technology at once. It erodes your capacity for sustaining focused attention *Elevating attention: 1. Develop awareness of your attention level 2. Take note of encounters in which you should listen carefully, but that seem to trigger low levels of attention 3. Consider the optimal level of attention required for adequate listening during these encounters 4. Compare the level of attention you observed in yourself versus the level of attention that is required, identifying the “attention gap” 5. Elevate your attention to the point necessary to take in the auditory and visual information your receiving Mental bracketing: systematically putting aside thoughts that aren’t relevant to the interaction at hand
3. Understanding: interpreting the meaning of another person’s