This research was aimed at finding out whether Iranian EFL learners of English at the pre-intermediate level would prefer bottom-up or top-down processing in their listening comprehension. 90 students participated in the study. Three experiments were conducted. In experiment 1, they heard a list of related words in each question and were asked to write the last word, the onset of which was changed to turn it into a similar word which did not belong to the set. In experiment 2, a semantically constraining sentence was provided in place of a list of words in each question. A highly predictable word at the end of the sentence was replaced by one which differed from it by one phoneme. In experiment 3, low frequency words were chosen which were unlikely to fall within the vocabulary of the learners but which phonologically resembled high-frequency words they were likely to know. The findings revealed that in experiments 1 and 2, the learners used bottom-up and top-down processing, respectively. However, in experiment 3 the learners neither preferred bottom-up nor top-down processing; they also wrote a lot of non-words. The results show the significance of both top-down and bottom-up processing in language classes.
