In making inferences, listeners go beyond what is stated explicitly and make informed guesses about what is implicitly intended. Understanding spoken language relies on the ability to retain and store information to create an integrated mental model of the state of affairs, that is, a situation model (Kintsch, 1994) including information that is mentioned overtly and information that is only suggested by the text. Listening comprehension, that is, the ability to understand spoken language, is essential for successful communication and has a prominent role in literacy acquisition and reading comprehension (Hoover & Gough, 1990). English input had a mediated effect on listening comprehension via morphological knowledge and vocabulary depth, but no direct effect.
Vocabulary depth and morphological knowledge explained listening comprehension abilities in all types of questions, but not their growth that is, all children improved in comprehension over time regardless of their initial morphological and vocabulary depth skills. The children showed growth over time in both literal questions and global inference questions, with performance on local inferences remaining stable over time. Vocabulary, morphosyntax, attention, and memory were included as predictors of listening comprehension alongside a measure of English input. The children were tested three times on their literal and inferential comprehension of stories.
This study presents longitudinal data on predictors of English listening comprehension in 100 bilingual children between the ages of 5 8 and 6 8 years. Research on monolingual children has shown that listening comprehension is predicted by a range of language and cognitive skills less is known about predictors of listening comprehension in bilingual children and about the role of language input.
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