Listening while talking: The retention of prose under articulatory suppression in relation to simultaneous interpreting

Abstract

According to working memory theory (e.g., Baddeley & Logie, 1999) articulatory suppression (AS) prevents rehearsal in the articulatory loop of to be remembered material, which, in turn, has a disruptive effect on recall. Simultaneous interpreting is an activity where people routinely comprehend and maintain speech while articulating at the same time. We examined whether AS also affects retention when, as in interpreting, coherent text is to be remembered or meaningful and phonologically more complex material is articulated. In the first part of the study, participants listened to a set of stories, and were involved in traditional or complex AS. Also coherence of the texts was manipulated. We found that the effects of AS generalises to stories, that coherence influences recall and that both variables interact. In the second part, we related individual differences in retention under conditions of AS to simultaneous interpreting performance. The results are discussed in terms of the episodic buffer component (e.g., Baddeley, 2000).