As indicated in Chapter II, auding is considered to be a specialized listening activity. It is defined as "listening to speech in order to language." In turn, as we have just seen, listening is the name for the process of attending to information in the auditory SIS (sensory information store) to process it for immediate use or for storage in long-term memory for later use. Thus auding is the process of extracting (attending to) the structural information in SIS, which in turn represents the structured information in speech sounds displayed in the environment.
How well information from auditory SIS gets processed depends upon factors which characterize the nature of the memory system as a dynamic information-processing system, such as the temporal parameter and load capacity of the SIS and STM, and the characteristics of attention, such as serial processing in the focus of attention and the ability to use preattentive processing (the degree of automaticity of information processing). Since these factors affect the processing of all information in the auditory system, they are called listening factors.
Obviously these listening factors will affect how well speech information is processed. In addition, however, because the system of spoken signs is arbitrary and conventional in terms of meanings, a learning process is required which may produce substantial differences among people in their ability to aud. For instance, limited numbers of verbal signs (low vocabulary) vis-a-vis a corpus of knowledge will limit the auder's ability to extract information from SIS by recoding it into meaningful conceptualizations and relating it to prior knowledge. This aspect of the information-processing task we would classify as a languaging problem embedded within and subject to the constraints of the more general process of attending to auditory information called listening. Thus we say that, while there are listening- but-not-auding activities, there are no auding-but-not-listening activities. Auding is .a special type of listening.