How to assess the listening comprehension skills of prereaders.

In Exp I, a listening span test, a word span test, and a listening comprehension test were administered to 24 preschoolers (ages 3 yrs 2 mo to 5 yrs 2 mo) to determine whether listening span correlated well with Ss' listening integration skills. In Exp II, with 20 preschoolers (aged 3 yrs 4 mo to 5 yrs) a longer listening comprehension test was administered in which comprehension depended on the integration of at least 2 important ideas in the narrative. Results show that the measure of listening span was a successful measure of the listening comprehension skills of prereaders because it tapped skills at an intermediate level of complexity. The word span measure involved lower-level processes like word encoding and lexical access, but listening span captured many of the processes of normal sentence comprehension. In addition, listening span was easy to administer and had high predictive validity. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)