Research Articles
Research Shows Hearing Aids Reduce Listening Effort in Noisy Conditions for Children Who Are Hard of Hearing
Reviewed by: Kathryn Wiseman, Ph.D.
Published: 2026
Reading time: ~3 min
Listening is not just a matter of hearing sounds. It takes effort!
For children who are hard of hearing, that effort is especially high, particularly in noisy environments like classrooms. Hearing aids help children have better access to sounds, but until now we were not sure if they also reduced the mental effort of listening. A 2026 study from Boys Town National Research Hospital researchers, published in Ear and Hearing, directly tested that question, and to our knowledge, it is the first study to demonstrate that hearing aids reduce listening effort in noisy conditions in school-age children who are hard of hearing.
What is listening effort, and how do you measure it?
Listening effort refers to the mental resources a person has to use to understand speech. When listening is easy, it takes little effort. When listening is hard, more mental energy is required.
The researchers measured listening effort using a dual-task paradigm. In this method, children performed two tasks at once: a primary task of listening to and repeating sentences, and a secondary task of responding to a visual test. The logic behind this paradigm is that when the primary task requires more effort, performance on the secondary task suffers. That difference in performance is called dual-task cost and serves as a measure of listening effort. Children also provided their own ratings of how much effort they felt they were using.
What did the study involve?
The team studied 33 school-age children who are hard of hearing, with a mean age of 10.11 years (range 8.25 to 11.92 years), who used hearing aids. Each child completed the dual-task paradigm in four conditions: listening to sentences with backgroundnoise with hearing aids, listening in noise without hearing aids, listening in quiet (no background noise) with hearing aids, and listening in quiet without hearing aids.
What did the researchers find?
When listening in noise, dual-task costs were lower in the aided condition compared to the unaided condition. This means that, in noisy settings, children used less mental effort to listen when they wore their hearing aids compared to when they did not wear their hearing aids.
When listening in quiet, dual-task costs did not differ between the aided and unaided conditions. However, children reported lower subjective ratings of effort in the aided condition when listening in quiet.
The researchers also found that the relationship between the behavioral measure of effort and the subjective measure of effort was absent to weak overall, but that subjective ratings of effort were moderately correlated with primary task performance in noise and in quiet when children did not use hearing aids.
The researchers concluded that the results support consistent hearing aid use in children who are hard of hearing, stating that hearing aids provide benefit for listening effort that gobeyond auditory access.
Why is this study significant?
The paper explicitly states this is the first study to demonstrate that hearing aids reduce listening effort in noisy conditions in school-age children who are hard of hearing and describes its contribution as novel and important to the literature on listening effort in this population.
Want to read the research yourself?
Gianakas SP, Wiseman KB, Walker EA. "Hearing Aids Can Reduce Listening Effort in School-Age Children Who Are Hard of Hearing." Ear and Hearing, 2026.
Published Article
The article of record on the publisher's website. DOI: 10.1121/10.0042364|
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