There are many scholars having been explaining listening processes.
Wipf (1984) states that listening is an invisible mental process so it is difficult
to describe. Listeners must discriminate between sounds, understand vocabulary and
grammatical structures, interpret stress and intention, retain and interpret this within
the immediate as well as the larger socio-cultural context of the utterance. Rost (2002)
defines listening, as a process of receiving what the speaker actually says (receptive
orientation); constructing and representing meaning (constructive orientation);
negotiating meaning with the speaker and responding (collaborative orientation); and,
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creating meaning through involvement, imagination and empathy (transformative
orientation). Listening is a complex, active process of interpretation in which listeners
match what they hear with what they already know.
To determine whether someone has heard a sentence, they can be asked to
repeat it or write it down. The fact that they can write down the sentence they hear to
show that sentences are fairly abstract, being invariant across both users and sense
modalities. However, the utterance and inscription are normally much more concrete
than the sentence itself, and between these and the sentence there are intermediate
levels of abstraction belonging to phonology and orthography. But sentences should
be focused because it is to them that meaning primarily attaches.