Irrelevant speech effects and sequence learning

Abstract

The irrelevant speech effect is the finding that performance on serial recall tasks is impaired by the presence of irrelevant background speech. According to the object-oriented episodic record (O-OER) model, this impairment is due to a conflict of order information from two different sources: the seriation of the irrelevant speech and the rehearsal of the order of the to-be-remembered items. We tested the model's prediction that irrelevant speech should impair performance on other tasks that involve seriation. Experiments 1 and 2 verified that both an irrelevant speech effect and a changing state effect would obtain in a between-subjects design in which a standard serial recall measure was used, allowing employment of a between-subjects design in subsequent experiments. Experiment 3 showed that performance on a sequence-learning task was impaired by the presence of irrelevant speech, and Experiment 4 verified that performance is worse when the irrelevant speech changes more (the changing state effect). These findings support the prediction made by the O-OER model that one essential component to the irrelevant speech effect is serial order information.