Article
Assessing Listening Effort in Primary School Children: A Dual-Task Approach (en)
* Presenting author
Abstract:
Children face various communication situations in their daily school life, e.g., frontal-teaching, group work and silent work. During all these school activities noise is omnipresent in class. It has already been found that noise in schools affects children’s learning during speech perception and influences their health. In these noisy conditions, the question arises: how effortful is listening for school children in class? To address this question, this study investigates listening effort in primary school children aged six to ten by introducing a child-appropriate dual-task approach. The dual-task paradigm involves word recognition as the primary task and digit recall as the secondary task. It further considers aurally accurate sound reproduction to create close-to-real life listening scenarios. The impact of multi-talker babble noise on listening effort, in both an anechoic and reverberant environment with varying signal-to-noise ratios is investigated. This study aims to validate this newly developed paradigm with primary school-aged children. Additionally, the effect of babble noise compared to a noise-free environment on listening effort is compared.