Speaking while listening: Broadbent revisited

Abstract

Air Force operators are often required to listen to several channels of ongoing radio communications while simultaneously responding to some or all of these messages. Broadbent (1952) showed that performance in such speaking-while-listening tasks typically resulted in a significant degradation. However, it was not clear if this decrement in performance was due to a competition of the resources required for simultaneous message comprehension and response formulation, or some other factor influencing the representation (such as poor signal quality). A replication of Broadbent’s study was undertaken to measure the ability of subjects to perform in speaking-while-listening tasks. Listeners responded to a series of yes-no queries posed by a recorded talker regarding the presence/location of items on a visual display. Responses were scored based on a subject's ability to (1) respond to their assigned call-sign, (2) use the correct querier call sign in their response, and (3) provide a response to the question about the query item. Two variables were manipulated: rate of incoming messages and fidelity of the recordings (additive noise or radio communications). Results indicate that changing the rate of incoming messages had the largest impact on accuracy of responses, while the fidelity of the message had a relatively minor impact on performance, suggesting that limitations in these tasks may be largely due to an interference with response formulation.