reported similar findings for kindergarten children exposed to irrelevant speech during a visual discrimination task. In Heft's study, children from noisy homes were less distracted during the task than children from quiet homes. Work by Cohen and colleagues (1980, 1986), however, indicates that over time (or as children age) children exposed to chronically noisy settings
may lose any short-term advantage they had over children from quieter settings when performing a task under acute noise conditions