Marc Vander Ghinst and colleagues used magnetoencephalography to measure six- to nine-year-old children and adults’ brain activity while listening to a recorded storyteller mixed with background conversations.<\/p>\n The researchers found that, compared to adults, children’s brains struggled to focus on the intended speaker’s voice with increasing background noise levels<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Children’s brains also had trouble following the syllable rate regardless of the amount of background noise.<\/p>\n The results imply that these abilities are still developing in late childhood and may not fully mature until the teenage years<\/strong>. They also help to explain why children have difficulty understanding speech in noisy backgrounds.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Society for Neuroscience press release: Researchers have clarified the development of the ability to attend to a speaker in a noisy environment — a phenomenon known as the… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[542,42,45,73,93,147,132],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28412"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28412"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28412\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28430,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28412\/revisions\/28430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/frustrated-child-youth.jpg\")
Researchers have clarified the development of the ability to attend to a speaker in a noisy environment<\/strong> — a phenomenon known as the “cocktail party effect<\/strong>.” Published in\u00a0JNeurosci<\/em>, the study could have implications for helping children navigate the often-noisy surroundings in which they grow and learn.<\/p>\n