Contribution
A Questionnaire Suitable to Assess Listening Effort in Children and Adults
* Presenting author
Abstract:
Hearing in noisy situations is known to be more effortful than in quiet environments for adults and especially for children. Listening effort is defined as the cognitive, attentional, and perceptual processing resources necessary to understand and process speech. This study developed a questionnaire to assess listening effort subjectively in children aged six to ten and adults. The questionnaire was tested with 35 children and 25 adults for five different classroom noise scenarios in combination with a listening experiment. The classroom noise scenarios were no noise and children’s multi-talker babble noise in an anechoic and reverberant environment with signal-to-noise ratios of 0dB and -3dB. Results demonstrated the questionnaire's internal consistency and its ability to differentiate listening effort across noise scenarios for both children and adults.