The term "cloze" means "based on or being a test of reading comprehension, in which the test taker is asked to supply words that have been systematically deleted from the test." (The American Heritage Dictionary) The word is derived from "closure", whereby something that is somehow incomplete is brought to completion. "Cloze" was picked to identify the ability to bring linguistic closure to an incomplete sentence, and sometimes this specific meaning of closure is spelled "clozure". This skill can be helpful to an interpreter in a number of ways.

Although we are generally unaware of it, we constantly use closure in our everyday listening for a variety of reason, including the fact that our mind often wanders, either to make associations with what has been said, or because of difficulties with attention. An interpreter needs to train her/himself to attend and I hope to add suggestions on how to improve listening comprehension, but let us deal with two other cases: (1) the word or phrase is not heard and (2) the word or phrase is heard, but not understood.

Some of the reasons that we might not hear a word, assuming that in general the acoustics allow for comfortable hearing, are: (1) The speaker's voice dips down momentarily because of (a) an embedded clause: "Washington, who was our first president, did not want to be considered a king", (b) an aside: "Now I'd like to show you some slides. George, could you get the lights?", (c) a snide remark: Person A says, "Clinton did not have sex with that woman." Person B responds under his breath, Right!", (d) embarrassment or other strong emotion: "And then I shot her! I'm so ashamed!, (e) or noise from (a) the speaker (cough, laughter, hiccup), (b) the environment (passing airplane, hearing aid feedback, a side conversation), or (c) internal to the interpreter (inattention, self-talk, or hearing loss). By now you can see how often something like this happens and we simply compensate by using clozure.

Some of the reasons a word is heard, but still not understood are: (1) the speaker has an accent (foreign or regional), (2) the word is unfamiliar jargon: "on points" from ballet (3) the word is a regional expressions: "legs up" to mean "a party", (4) the word is from a foreign language and the speaker forgot to translate it for his audience or assumes they know it: A rabbi says "Moshe rabeinu" to mean "Moses", or (5) high falutin' vocabulary: "The very apotheosis of courage." As with words that are unheard, the interpreter needs to first try and cloze on these things if possible and to prepared him/herself for specialized vocabulary.

Suppose we have the following sentence and the two blanks are words that are unheard: "Now language is also like a game in a number of ways. Basically, like a _____ you usually need more than ___ person to play language. Usually you talk to somebody else. . ." Some of the clues that can be used are as follows: Clue 1: The first sentence says that "language is also like a game", so a listener can predict that the speaker will tell the ways that language is like a game. This is an example of prediction, which is a particularly useful tool because it increases listening comprehension, helps with clozure, assists in structuring the discourse, and allows for abstracting, a term developed by Lynn Finton of NTID to refer to the need to pick out the salient features because a speech act is too fast or too dense to be properly represented in the other language. Clue 2: The first sentence contains the phrase like a game. Sometimes a speaker will repeat a phrase in order to give coherence to his or her talk. This is an example of coherence. Clue 3: The indefinite article "a" precedes the blank. Only a noun phrase can follow an article - word class. This might lead to us assuming that the first blank is "game".

Now for the second blank. Clue 1: How many people do you need to play a game? - content knowledge. Clue 2: What type of word is needed in the blank? We need a number because of the words "more than" - logic. Clue 3: "Person" is singular. "People" is plural. Therefore, what number is in the blank before "person"? - the linguistic concept of "number". Clue 4: The last sentence, "usually you talk to someone else", repeats the idea that you need more than one person - discourse patterns. Other things that can be used are cultural knowledge and backcloze, the latter being when we listen to more of what is said in order to make sense of a missing element that occurred previously.