Purpose Listening effort can be defined as the deliberate allocation of mental resources to overcome obstacles when carrying out a listening task. Requiring mental resources, it may detract from other types of cognitive activities, leading to a general worsening of cognitive performances. The aim of this review is to provide information about how to use pupillometry to explore listening effort in children too and discuss the suitability of this technique when measuring listening effort in this population. Materials and methods After reporting a brief overview of pupillometry and listening effort, results from researchers concerning listening effort and children will be presented first to then go deeper into the research on the topic by means of pupillometry. Results Listening effort has a direct link with cognitive resources, as when the environment is surrounded by noise, the cognitive system requires additional effort and consequently the cognitive abilities required for the task that is being conducted becomes impoverished. This effect becomes more evident in the case of children, and has important consequences on speech perception and scholastic performance. Conclusions In children, listening effort is a major issue, as they are still developing mature language skills that can help them compensating for inaccurate speech recognition. Since children spend most of their time in noisy environments, it is very important to examine the consequences of listening in acoustically inadequate conditions. Pupillometry could be a good way of reflecting the effects of noise on children’s cognitive abilities by adding more objective evidence to the topic.

Text generation—the mental translation of ideas into language at word, sentence, and discourse levels—involves oral language abilities. However, oral language skills are rarely a target of writing interventions. We ran an intervention to improve fifth and 10th graders’ written production through the development of oral sentence generation (grammatical and syntactic) skills. One hundred and fifteen students—68 fifth graders (four classrooms) and 47 tenth graders (four classrooms)—participated in a stepped-wedge cluster-randomized controlled trial. Two fifth-grade classrooms (n = 35) and two 10th-grade classrooms (n = 20) received nine 90-min sessions (3 weeks, three sessions a week) of oral language intervention immediately after the pretest (experimental groups); the two other fifth- (n = 33) and 10th-grade classrooms (n = 27) received business-as-usual writing instruction and received a delayed oral language intervention after the posttest (waiting list group). The intervention consisted of team-based games to improve oral sentence generation and sentence reformulation skills. We assessed written sentence generation, written sentence reformulation, written text quality (macrostructure and language), and text writing fluency before (pretest) and after (posttest) the intervention and 5 weeks after the intervention (follow-up). The results showed that training on oral sentence generation skills can lead to significant gains in both sentence generation and sentence reformulation skills and text macrostructural quality. Improvement at the sentence level was, however, significant only for the younger writers (fifth graders).