Investigating Listening Effort in Classrooms for 5- to 7-Year-Old Children

Purpose This study aims to investigate the listening effort made by young children in real classrooms during a prolonged speech reception task in the presence of background noise. Method The experiment was proposed to 117 typically developing kindergarten and primary school pupils, aged 5–7 years old. An ecological experimental approach was followed, and speech-in-noise tests were presented in the classrooms to groups made up of the whole class. The speech material of the Word Intelligibility by Picture Identification Test in the Italian language (Arslan, Genovese, Orzan, & Turrini, 1997) was presented in 2 listening conditions (quiet classroom [no noise added] and working classroom [with stationary noise]) and was repeated twice during the experiment. Data on the number of correctly recognized words and the single-task response time (RT) were collected; the quantity of the latter was considered informative on listening effort. Results It was found that when background noise was present, the pupils' perfo...