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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This study explores if increasing number of repetitions might improve the precision of the acceptable noise level (ANL) test. Design: We measured twelve ANL repetitions, i.e. four complete ANL tests (4 × 3 repetitions), at one session using diotic presentation and a non-semantic ANL version. Study sample: Thirty-two normal-hearing adults. Results: Small order and fatigue effects were seen. We used the coefficient of repeatability (CR) to assess the repeatability; CRs ranged between 3.9 and 7.6 dB for the four ANL tests. Using the twelve ANL repetitions we removed the variability of the ANL across subjects by normalizing the data to the individual mean ANL for the twelve repetitions. The mean normalized ANL across the subjects rapidly approached the ANL normalized to the individual mean for the 12 repetitions (0 dB), and after three repetitions the SD seemed to be stable at about 3 dB. Conclusions: The findings suggest that both order and fatigue affect the ANL. The findings also suggest that it may be more accurate to speak of an acceptable noise range than ANL. These findings have large implications for how we understand acceptable noise and it would explain a large part of the variability seen among normal-hearing and perhaps hearing-impaired subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]