Perception is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory

information in order to represent and understand the presented information or

environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous
system, which in turn result from physical or chemical stimulation of the
sensory system. Perception is not only the passive reciept of these signals, but
it’s also shaped by the recipient’s learning, memory, expectation , and
attention. Sensory input is a process that transform this low-level information to
higher-level infotrmation. When we encounter an unfamilar target, we are very
open to the informational cues contained in the target and the situation
surrounding it. The first stage doesn’t give us enough information on which to
base perceptions of the target, so we will actively seek out cues to resolve this
ambiguity. Gradually, we collect some familar cues that enable us to make a
rough categorization of the target. For example , vision involves light striking
the retina of the eyes , smell is mediated by odor molecules and hearing
involves pressure waves.

Parsing is often performed as a method of understanding the exact meaning of

a sentence or word, sometimes with the aid of devices such as sentence
diagram. It usually emphasizes the importance of grammatical division such as
subject and predicate. Parsing was formerly central to the teaching of grammar
throughout the English-speaking world, and widely regarded as basic to the
use and understanding of written language.However, the general teaching of
such techniques is no longer current. Human sentences are not easily parsed
by programs, as there is substantial ambiguity in the structure of human
language, whose usage is to convey meaning among a potentially unlimited
range of possibilities but only some of which are germane to the particular
case. So an utterance “ Man bites dog” versus “ Dog bites man” is definite on
one detail but in another language. In other word they quickly forgot what is
heard, unable to form a mental representation from words heard. The listener
do not understand subsequent parts of input because of earlier problems.

Utilization is the final phase in the cognitive processing it is occurs when

listeners relate mental representations of the input to existing knowledge
stored in the long term memory. Using your background knowledge to interpret
the input for storage, they are confused about key ideas in the message. Some
of the people are unable to get the full meaning of the message even though
they had understood the literal meaning of the words. This is a utilisation
problem because it is related to the listeners' ability to make useful elaborating
inferences or act on the intended meaning of the message. For example a man
talked about special management of company in American English. I can
understand most of the words, but I can't join them together and understand
whole sentences meaning. I asked someone else what's the topic and I
listened as carefully as possible.

Top down strategies focus on the big picture and general meaning of a
listening text. Often the starting point is to discuss the topic and then use a gist
or extensive task to listen for the overall meaning. It also refers to the use of
background information in pattern recognition. It always begins with a person’s
previous knowledge, and makes prediction due to this already aquired
knowledge. In other words, we construct our perception of reality, and these
perceptions are hypotheses or proposition based on past experience and
stored information. The formation of incorrect propositon will lead to errors of
perception such as visula iluusion.

Bottom-up processing is also known as data-driven processing, because it

originates with the stimulation of the sensory receptors. Serration is the ability
to arrange items in a logical order along a quantitative dimension such as
length, weight, age , etc. It is a general cognotive skills which is not fully
mastered until after the nursery years. There are good reason for this given
that learners need to be able to listen effectively even when faced with
unfamiliar vocabulary or structure. However, if the learner understands very
few words from the incoming signal, even knowledge about the context may
not be sufficient for her to understand what is happening, and she can easily
get lost. Bottom up listening activities can help learners to understand enough
linguistic elements of what they hear to then be able to use their top down skill
in the gaps.