Assessing listening effort in children: A child-appropriate dual-task paradigm investigating the influence of different noise conditions

Abstract

In classrooms, children are often challenged by competing speech, loud background noises, or unfavorable room acoustics when listening to their educators. These challenging listening situations require more cognitive, attentional, and perceptual processing resources to understand speech, i.e., higher listening effort. This study introduces a dual-task paradigm to evaluate listening effort, specifically in children. The paradigm encompasses a word recognition task as the primary task and a serial recall task as the secondary task. The influence of multi-talker babble noise on listening effort is studied in an anechoic and reverberant environment with different signal-to-noise ratios. It further incorporates aurally-accurate sound reproduction allowing plausible listening situations appropriate to children’s smaller anthropometric sizes. The aim is to validate the newly developed paradigm in an experiment with children. The listening effort in noisy conditions is compared to a noise-free condition. Moreover, the influence of anechoic versus reverberant noise scenarios on listening effort is investigated.