These items are designed to measure how well students can understand short samples of speech and deal with a variety of signals on the lexical and grammatical levels of phonology. They are very suitable for use in tests administered in the language laboratory but they do not resemble natural discourse. The spontaneity, redundancy, hesitations, false starts and ungrammatical forms, all of which constitute such an important part of real-life speech, are generally absent from these types of items simply because they have been prepared primarily as written language to be read aloud.