Key concepts in ELT
'Bottom-up' and 'top-down'
In accounts of foreign-language listening and
reading, perceptual information is often
described as 'bottom-up', while information
provided by context is said to be 'top-down'.
The terms have been borrowed from cognitive
psychology, but derive originally from computer
science, where they distinguish processes that are
data-driven from those that are knowledge-driven.
Underlying the metaphors 'top' and 'bottom' is a
hierarchical view of the stages through which
listening or reading proceeds. In listening, the
lowest level (i.e. the smallest unit) is the phonetic
feature. A simple analysis might present the
listener as combining groups of features into
phonemes, phonemes into syllables, syllables into
words, words into clauses, and clauses into
propositions. At the 'top' is the overall meaning
of the utterance, into which new information is
integrated as it emerges. Drawing on this concept
of levels of processing, many ELT commentators
present a picture of listening and reading in which
bottom-up information from the signal is
assembled step by step, and is influenced
throughout by top-down information from
context.
The truth is rather more complex. First, it is not
certain that bottom-up processing involves all the
levels described. Some psychologists believe that
we process speech into syllables without passing
through a phonemic level; others that we construct
words directly from phonetic features. Nor does
bottom-up processing deal with one level at a
time. There is evidence that in listening it takes
place at a delay of only a quarter of a second
behind the speakerwhich implies that the tasks
of analysing the phonetic signal, identifying words,
and assembling sentences must all be going on in
parallel.
A quarter of a second is roughly the length of an
English syllableso the listener often begins the
processing of a word before the speaker has
finished saying it. The listener forms hypotheses as
to the identity of the word being uttered, which
are said to be activated to different degrees
according to how closely they match the signal.
The candidates compete with each other until,
when the evidence is complete, one of them
outstrips the rest.
338 ELT Journal Volume 53/4 October 1999 Oxford University Press 1999
Like 'bottom-up' processing, 'top-down' is more
complex than is sometimes suggested. Contextual
information can come from many different
sources: from knowledge of the speaker/writer or
from knowledge of the world; from analogy with a
previous situation or from the meaning that has
been built up so far. It can be derived from a
schema, an expectation set up before reading or
listening; it can take the form of spreading
activation, where one word sparks off
associations with others; or it can be based upon
Downloaded from http://eltj.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on November 3, 2014
the probability of one word following another. It is
important to specify which of these cues is
intended when the expression 'top-down' is
employed.
Also unspecified in many accounts of L2 reading
and listening is the way in which bottom-up and
top-down processes interact. Does one occur
before the other, or do they operate
simultaneously? The evidence from LI research
is contradictory. Some findings suggest that
contextual information is invoked before
perception, helping us to anticipate words;
others, that it becomes available during the
perceptual process; others, that it is only
employed after a word has been identified.
Goodman's much-quoted view (1970) that
successful readers guess ahead using current
context has not been conclusively demonstrated.
Some researchers argue for completely interactive
models of listening and reading, in which top-
down and bottom-up processes extend
simultaneously through all levels. In support of
such models, they cite evidence of word
superiority effects, where knowledge of complete
words influences the way we perceive sounds or
letters. This kind of effect is appropriately
described as 'top-down' since it involves
knowledge at a higher level affecting processing
at a lower. So note that the term 'top-down' is not
always synonymous with 'contextual'.
Finally, the vexed question of the use of bottom-
up and top-down information by foreign-language
learners. A truism of ELT has it that low-level
listeners and readers become fixated at word level,
and do not have enough spare attentional capacity
to construct global meaning. In truth, learners
appear to make considerable use of top-down
information: employing it compensatorily to plug
gaps where their understanding of a text is
incomplete. The best account of this process is
provided by Stanovich's interactive-compensatory
mechanism (1980), originally formulated for LI
reading. Stanovich suggests that we use contextual
information to make up for unreliability in the
signal (bad handwriting, for example, or ambient
noise). The more flawed the bottom-up
information, the more we draw upon cues from
top-down sources. This seems to describe
accurately the way in which L2 learners resort to
top-down inferencing when understanding is
impaired by limited vocabulary or syntax. The
strategy may be more common in listening than in
reading: see Lund (1991).
For accounts of the role of bottom-up and top-
down processes in LI reading, see Oakhill and
Garnham (1988), and Chapters 2-3 of Perfetti
(1985). Currently, the most influential model of LI
listening is the fully-interactive Cohort Model
(Marslen-Wilson 1987).
References
Goodman, K. S. 1970.: 'Reading: A psycholinguis-
tic guessing game' in H. Singer and R. B.
Ruddell (eds.). Theoretical Models and Pro-
cesses of Reading. Newark, DE: International
Reading Association.
Key concepts in ELT
Lund, R. J. 1991: 'A comparison of second
language listening and reading comprehension'.
Modern Language Journal 75: 196-204.
Marslen-Wilson, W. D. 1987: 'Functional paralle-
lism in spoken word recognition'. Cognition 25.
Oakhill, J. and A. Garnham. 1988. Becoming a
Skilled Reader. Oxford: Blackwell.
Perfetti, C. A. 1985. Reading Ability. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Stanovich, K. E. 1980: 'Toward an interactive-
compensatory model of individual differences in
the development of reading fluency'. Reading
Research Quarterly 16: 32-71.
The author
John Field has a long-term interest in skills
Downloaded from http://eltj.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on November 3, 2014
approaches in ELT. His publications include
listening and study skills materials, a BBC radio
series for beginners, distance-learning materials
for Chinese television, and national secondary
school coursebooks for Saudi Arabia. He has
trained teachers in Europe, the Middle East, the
Far East, and Africa. He is about to complete a
PhD on listening at Cambridge University, and
lectures on the MA course in ELT and Applied
Linguistics at Kings College London.
E-mail: jcfl000@dircon.co.uk
339