Listening Effort Through Depth of Processing in School-Age Children

Area of Science:

• Audiology
• Speech-Language Pathology
• Cognitive Psychology

Background:

• Assessing listening effort is vital for children's aural rehabilitation.
• Existing methods may lack practicality or reliability for school-aged children.
• A novel behavioral paradigm is proposed to address this gap.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce and validate a new behavioral paradigm for measuring listening effort in children.
• To investigate the impact of background noise and semantic processing depth on listening effort.
• To differentiate the effects of noise and processing depth on word recognition versus listening effort.

Main Methods:

• A novel behavioral paradigm was developed using word recognition and categorization tasks.
• The paradigm was tested on 31 normal-hearing children aged 7-12 years.
• Response time (RT) from categorization tasks and word recognition scores (WRS) were collected under varying signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) and processing depths.

Main Results:

• Word recognition scores (WRS) decreased with increased background noise.
• Listening effort, measured by RT, was significantly affected by both SNR and semantic processing depth.
• Depth of processing did not influence WRS, but RT varied with processing depth.

Conclusions:

• The proposed RT-based paradigm effectively measures listening effort in children.
• Background noise and semantic processing depth are key factors influencing listening effort.
• Further research should explore age, working memory, and cross-modality effects on listening effort measurement.