Criticisms of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) have included speculation that the listening test places too much burden on short-term memory as compared with comprehension, that a knowledge of reading is required to respond successfully, and that many items appear to require mere recall and matching rather than higher-order processing skills. To address these criticisms, a study was designed with 120 learners for whom English was a Second Language (ESL learners) and 3 listening tests with 144 total items to examine test item functioning under conditions of stimulus repetition versus nonrepetition, variations of length of aural stimulus passage and of associated numbers of items, shorter versus longer reading response options, and higher versus lower levels of processing skills required. Overall, results suggest that tasks like those of the TOEFL listening test would benefit from shortening the response-option length, but that it would not be beneficial to repeat stimulus passages nor to increase the proportion of items that depend on comprehension of greater rather than lesser amounts of text. Nine tables present the analyses, and an appendix presents the test instruments. (Contains 17 references.) (SLD)