Is children’s listening effort in background noise influenced by the speaker’s voice quality?

Abstract

The present study aims at exploring the influence of voice quality on listening effort in children performing a language comprehension test with sentences of increasing difficulty. Listening effort is explored in relation to gender ( = cisgender). The study has a between-groups design. Ninety-three mainstreamed children aged 8;2 to 9;3 with typical language development participated. The children were randomly assigned to two groups (n = 46/47) with equal allocation of boys and girls and for the analysis to four groups depending of gender and voice condition. Working memory capacity and executive functions were tested in quiet. A digital version of a language comprehension test (the TROG-2) was used to measure the effect of voice quality on listening effort, measured as response time in a forced-choice paradigm. The groups listened to sentences through recordings of the same female voice, one group with a typical voice and one with a dysphonic voice, both in competing multi-talker babble noise. Response times were logged after a time buffer between the sentence-ending and indication of response. There was a significant increase in response times with increased task difficulty and response times between the two voice conditions differed significantly. The girls in the dysphonic condition were slower with increasing task difficulty. A dysphonic voice clearly adds to the noise burden and listening effort is greater in girls than in boys when the teacher speaks with dysphonic voice in a noisy background. These findings might mirror gender differences as for coping strategies in challenging contexts and have important implications for education.

Keywords:

• Babble noise
• children
• classroom
• cognitive capacity
• dysphonic teacher voice
• gender
• noise
• response times
• task difficulty

Acknowledgements

This work was performed within the Linnaeus Research Environment, Cognition, Comprehension and Learning (CCL). Parts of the results in this article were previously published in Swedish (2014) as a Master thesis in Logopedics at Lund University. The authors would like to thank the master thesis authors: speech-language pathologists Maria Langvik and Julia Wellershaus. Further, we are indebted to PhD Susanna Whitling for performing the vocal loading and to the speech-language pathologists who performed the voice assessments.

Notification of ethical adherence

The study received approval from the regional ethics committee. The study adhered to the Declaration of Helsinki ethical principles.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the article. The authors confirm this manuscript is an original contribution, not previously published and not under consideration for publication elsewhere.