Understanding how children process speech in noisy environments is essential for designing effective educational and therapeutic interventions for speech and hearing challenges. Every day, children spend a large part of their time in classrooms, which represent acoustically complex environments, including competing talkers and activity-based noise. Listening in such settings is particularly demanding for children, as their auditory cognition is still developing. For primary school children specifically, understanding speech in noisy situations is cognitively demanding, requiring a higher amount of cognitive resources. Such situations require increased listening effort, defined as the deliberate allocation of mental resources needed to overcome obstacles in goal pursuit when carrying out a listening task. Investigating listening effort in classroom scenarios requires the consideration of age-appropriate measurement methods and realistic acoustic conditions, including challenging signal-to-noise ratios, and activity-based noise variations. Currently, there is limited research integrating realistic classroom noise conditions, employing comprehensive measurement approaches, and examining individual developmental differences. This thesis aims to contribute to three main objectives: transferring artificial laboratory-based research into realistic classroom noise scenarios, assessing listening effort through multidimensional measurement approaches, and examining how children’s demographic characteristics influence cognitive demands in noisy conditions. To achieve the first aim, the acoustic environments of primary school classrooms were characterised through measurements, and realistic noise scenes were recreated using auralisation and iterative acoustic modelling. The second aim involves combining behavioural listening effort measures from listening experiments with subjective perceptions assessed with a newly developed child-appropriate questionnaire to capture the multidimensionality of listening effort. For the third aim, developmental differences were examined across four empirical studies involving 172 children aged six to ten. In addition, the influence of children’s socioeconomic status and leisure activities was considered. Key findings reveal that listening was significantly more effortful for six- to seven-year-olds than for eight- to ten-year-olds, as evidenced by both subjective and behavioural measures. Importantly, both assessment approaches yielded aligned results, suggesting that a multidimensional approach to evaluating listening effort is both valid and beneficial for future research and clinical applications. Overall, this thesis provides comprehensive evidence of how children allocate their cognitive resources in realistic classroom scenarios, establishing methodological foundations for future educational and clinical applications.

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