Reflection tasks 3 and 4 below are designed to help you become aware of the different levels of comprehension and how different levels interact.

Reflection task 3

Reflection task 4

Here's what probably happened when you when you did Reflection task 4:

Having identified the string of phonemes 'a-tt-a-ck', you would have rapidly accessed the lexical information associated with the word 'attack', that is, the meaning of the action and the semantic roles typically involved: an agent (an animate someone or something) attacks a patient (someone or something suffering the action). You can do this quickly, because you are a fluent user of English, but of course, it is much for difficult for language learners whose vocabulary knowledge may be limited.

Having accessed 'attack', you then searched the other words you had retained (for fleeting microseconds, in short-term memory) for the agent (usually the subject) and the patient (usually the object). The verb 'attack' may also be associated with information about the instrument used, the time, the place and the result of the attack.

As we identify a word in the stream of sound, so we make predictions about the possible semantic roles it might play.That in turn helps us to identify other words and fit a coherent proposition around them. Again, we draw on our knowledge of the world to do this quickly: for example, 'tennis rackets' are more likely to play the role of instrument than the role of patient of the verb 'attack'.

Thus, on the basis of your lexical processing so far, you probably arrived at something like the following proposition:

So far so good ... But imagine you then responded on the basis of this understanding and the reaction was one of incomprehension:

What might have gone wrong? What did you miss?

1) Grammatical cues
Now in most languages, various grammatical cues (words and parts of words) also help to confirm the assignment of semantic roles to the words in an utterance. For example, in languages such as German and Russian, there are different endings for subjects (usually, agents) and objects (patients): phrases expressing time, manner and place occur in predictable places in the utterance, or are marked with particular endings. In English and French, standard word order places the subject (usually, agents) before the verb.

Fluent listeners pay only very fleeting attention to these grammatical cues: just enough to monitor for any information which might challenge their interpretation. For less fluent listeners, or even expert listeners listening in difficult conditions such as our noisy party, this background monitoring of grammatical cues may simply be too demanding - such that miscomprehensions can occur:

Back to the party ... and what the other speaker actually said was:

2) Background information
Now, what you didn't know was that the speaker worked as a hospital doctor. Furthermore, the topic of conversation before you joined in had been the increasing numbers of attacks on hospital doctors.

The idea that the attack happened in a hospital probably did not occur to you: you probably made the obvious connection between 'seriously injured' and 'ending up in hospital (as a patient)'. But had you been aware of the context in which the incident was being recounted, you probably would have interpreted 'hospital' correctly.

Another point which might have led you to reject your original interpretation is that we generally prioritize the things which are closest to us. Thus, if 'my colleague' had been the attacker, it would have been more natural to talk about what had happened to him, rather than what had happened to the neighbour.

In both Reflection tasks 3 and 4, we can see how we mobilize our knowledge of language and our knowledge of the world to help us arrive as quickly as possible at the intentional level of comprehension - at the main point of what the speaker is trying to say. We don't always get it right! This reminds us of just how demanding listening can sometimes be for second language learners.