Irrelevant Speech Effect Research Articles

Individual refresh ability modulates irrelevant speech effect in reading: Evidence from eye movements

This study randomly recruited 245 college students aged between 18 and 21 years old who had never studied Spanish and selected 60 subjects (30 with high refresh ability and 30 with low refresh ability) based on their scores on a refresh ability test. The mixed experimental design of 2 (refresh ability: high, low) ×3 (background sound: meaningful, meaningless, silent) was adopted. The Eyelink1000 eye tracker was used to record the eye movement data of the subjects when reading the sentences of scientific papers. At the same time, meaningful (news broadcasting) or meaningless (Spanish) background sounds are played. Based on this, the moderating effect of individual refresh ability with the impact of irrelevant speech was investigated. According to the results, the interaction between refresh ability and the meaningful background sound condition was significant, and it had an impact on the totalreading time, gaze count, regression count, total fixation time, and regression-path duration. However, the interaction with the meaningless background sound condition was not significant. The results showed that: (1) refresh ability significantly regulates the irrelevant speech effect in reading, compared with individuals with high refresh ability. The meaningful background sounds have a greater negative impact on the reading of individuals with low refresh ability; (2) the regulating effect of refresh ability occurs in the late stage of vocabulary processing and semantic integration. The results supported the attentional capture theory and found that the irrelevant speech effect in Chinese reading is modulated by individual refresh ability, which mainly acts on semantic components in late reading processing.

Akustisch optimierte Arbeitswelten

Acoustically optimized working environments: Strategies to increase productivity, comfort and attractiveness In open office structures, noise is still a widespread source of dissatisfaction, annoyance, disruption and stress. The well-documented effects of noise in research, such as the “irrelevant speech effect”, i.e. the disruption of cognitive performance due to irrelevant background speech, can be found in practice as central challenges of acoustic design. Five aspects are presented below that should definitely be considered when planning and optimizing acoustics – for greater satisfaction, well-being and productivity in the office.

The irrelevant speech effect in listeners with normal hearing and self-reported hearing loss

The irrelevant speech effect in listeners with normal hearing and self-reported hearing loss

The effects of irrelevant speech on physiological stress, cognitive performance, and subjective experience – Focus on heart rate variability

Irrelevant speech impairs cognitive performance, especially in tasks requiring verbal short-term memory. Working on these tasks during irrelevant speech can also cause a physiological stress reaction. The aim of this study was to examine heart rate variability (HRV) as a non-invasive and easy-to-use stress measure in an irrelevant speech paradigm. Thirty participants performed cognitive tasks (n-back and serial recall) during two sound conditions: irrelevant speech (50 dB) and quiet (33 dB steady-state noise). The influence of conditions as well as presentation orders of conditions were examined on performance, subjective experience, and physiological stress. Working during irrelevant speech compared to working during quiet reduced performance, namely accuracy, in the serial recall task. It was more annoying, heightened the perceived workload, and lowered acoustic satisfaction. It was related to higher physiological stress by causing faster heart rate and changes in HRV frequency-domain analysis (LF, HF and LF/HF). The order of conditions showed some additional effects. When speech was the first condition, 3-back performance was less accurate, and serial recall response times were longer, heart rate was faster, and successive heart beats had less variability (lower RMSSD) during speech than during quiet. When quiet was the first condition, heart rate was faster and reaction times in 3-back were slower during quiet than during speech. The negative effect of irrelevant speech was clear in experience, performance, and physiological stress. The study shows that HRV can be used as a physiological stress measure in irrelevant speech studies.

Effects of irrelevant speech on semantic and phonological judgments of Chinese characters

ABSTRACT This study investigated whether background speech impairs lexical processing and how speech characteristics modulate such influence based on task type. Chinese character pairs were displayed to native Chinese readers under four auditory conditions: normal Chinese speech, phonotactically legal but meaningless speech, spectrally-rotated speech (i.e. meaningless sound with no accessible phonological form), or silence. Participants were tasked with determining whether the presented character pair shared the same meaning (semantic judgment), or the same initial phoneme (phonological judgment). Participants performed better and faster in the semantic than in the phonological judgment task. Phonological properties of meaningless speech prolonged participants’ reaction times in the phonological but not the semantic judgment task, whilst the semantic properties of speech only delayed reaction times in the semantic judgment task. The results indicate that background speech disrupts lexical processing, with the nature of the primary task affecting the extent of phonological and semantic disruption.

Is Recognition of Speech in Noise Related to Memory Disruption Caused by Irrelevant Sound?

Listeners with normal audiometric thresholds show substantial variability in their ability to understand speech in noise (SiN). These individual differences have been reported to be associated with a range of auditory and cognitive abilities. The present study addresses the association between SiN processing and the individual susceptibility of short-term memory to auditory distraction (i.e., the irrelevant sound effect [ISE]). In a sample of 67 young adult participants with normal audiometric thresholds, we measured speech recognition performance in a spatial listening task with two interfering talkers (speech-in-speech identification), audiometric thresholds, binaural sensitivity to the temporal fine structure (interaural phase differences [IPD]), serial memory with and without interfering talkers, and self-reported noise sensitivity. Speech-in-speech processing was not significantly associated with the ISE. The most important predictors of high speech-in-speech recognition performance were a large short-term memory span, low IPD thresholds, bilaterally symmetrical audiometric thresholds, and low individual noise sensitivity. Surprisingly, the susceptibility of short-term memory to irrelevant sound accounted for a substantially smaller amount of variance in speech-in-speech processing than the nondisrupted short-term memory capacity. The data confirm the role of binaural sensitivity to the temporal fine structure, although its association to SiN recognition was weaker than in some previous studies. The inverse association between self-reported noise sensitivity and SiN processing deserves further investigation.

Does auditory stream segregation reduce the irrelevant speech effect?

Does auditory stream segregation reduce the irrelevant speech effect?

Cognitive performance in open-plan office acoustic simulations: Effects of room acoustics and semantics but not spatial separation of sound sources

The irrelevant sound effect (ISE) characterizes short-term memory performance impairment during irrelevant sounds relative to quiet. Irrelevant sound presentation in most laboratory-based ISE studies has been rather limited to represent complex scenarios including open-plan offices (OPOs) and not many studies have considered serial recall of heard information. This paper investigates ISE using an auditory-verbal serial recall task, wherein performance was evaluated for relevant factors in simulating OPO acoustics: the irrelevant sounds including the semanticity of speech, reproduction methods over headphones, and room acoustics. Results (Experiments 1 and 2) show that ISE was exhibited in most conditions with anechoic (irrelevant) nonspeech sounds with/without speech, but the effect was substantially higher with meaningful speech compared to foreign speech, suggesting a semantic effect. Performance differences in conditions with diotic and binaural reproductions were not statistically robust, suggesting limited role of spatial separation of sources. In Experiment 3, statistically robust ISE were exhibited for binaural room acoustic conditions with mid-frequency reverberation times, T30 (s) = 0.4, 0.8, 1.1, suggesting cognitive impairment regardless of sound absorption representative of OPOs. Performance differences in T30 = 0.4 s relative to T30 = 0.8 and 1.1 s conditions were statistically robust. This emphasizes the benefits for cognitive performance with increased sound absorption, reinforcing extant room acoustic design recommendations. Performance differences in T30 = 0.8 s vs. 1.1 s were not statistically robust. Collectively, these results suggest that certain findings from ISE studies with idiosyncratic acoustics may not translate well to complex OPO acoustic environments.

Serial recall performance under different room acoustic conditions

In office workplaces high demands on the concentration of employees are set. This is contrasted by the effect of irrelevant speech, which has been shown to decrease working memory performance. The presented survey investigates the impact of different room acoustic conditions on the irrelevant speech effect. To address this question, the decrease of performance was investigated by a serial recall test using a within-subject design. Six stimuli were used for the experiment: silence as reference, pink noise, two speech signals with different degrees of fluctuation strength, each presented in room acoustic conditions with long and without reverberation. Each stimulus is used in twelve trials. One trial consisted of the representation phase of nine digits, sequentially presented in random order and the recall phase. Furthermore, different test designs were used. In the first design the playback of the stimulus was continuing during twelve trials. In the second design each trial had a randomised stimulus playback. In addition, the annoyance was assessed, and a closing interview conducted. The results of the study with 44 participants are presented and discussed in this contribution. Overall, a significant decrease in performance is observed in the speech conditions compared to the reference condition.

Investigating the Disturbance Impact of Background Speech on Verbal and Visual-Spatial Short-Term Memory: On the Differential Contributions of Changing-State and Phonology to the Irrelevant Sound Effect

ABSTRACT The empirically robust phenomenon of impaired verbal short-term memory due to task-irrelevant background speech is known as the Irrelevant Sound Effect (ISE). Yet, the underlying cognitive mechanisms are still not fully resolved, like whether phonology-based interference contributes to the disruptive effect of speech on verbal serial recall. Thus, we tested the ISE for such a speech-specific aspect by varying the phonological content of the irrelevant speech and the verbal nature of the task. Furthermore, we also varied the changing-state characteristic of irrelevant speech. Therefore, visual-verbal and visual-spatial serial recall of 70 participants each was measured during silence and syllable series varying in phonological (unaltered speech vs. sinewave speech) and in changing-state content (one repeatedly presented vs. successively changing syllables). Both phonology and changing-state characteristic had significant and independent impacts on each of the two serial recall tasks, and both effects were unrelated to participants’ working memory capacity. Changing-state sequences were more disturbing than steady-state sounds for both serial recall tasks, but the effect of phonological content was not in the same direction for the two tasks. Whereas unaltered speech sounds impaired verbal serial recall more than their phonologically reduced sinewave versions, this was the opposite for visual-spatial serial recall. In the latter task, however, only changing-state sinewave speech reduced performance significantly compared to silence condition. In summary, our results indicate that there is a speech-specific, disruptive effect of phonological content, which is an attention-independent interference effect and presumably restricted to verbal short-term memory.

Irrelevant speech impairs serial recall of verbal but not spatial items in children and adults

Immediate serial recall of visually presented items is reliably impaired by task-irrelevant speech that the participants are instructed to ignore (“irrelevant speech effect,” ISE). The ISE is stronger with changing speech tokens (words or syllables) when compared to repetitions of single tokens (“changing-state effect,” CSE). These phenomena have been attributed to sound-induced diversions of attention away from the focal task (attention capture account), or to specific interference of obligatory, involuntary sound processing with either the integrity of phonological traces in a phonological short-term store (phonological loop account), or the efficiency of a domain-general rehearsal process employed for serial order retention (changing-state account). Aiming to further explore the role of attention, phonological coding, and serial order retention in the ISE, we analyzed the effects of steady-state and changing-state speech on serial order reconstruction of visually presented verbal and spatial items in children (n = 81) and adults (n = 80). In the verbal task, both age groups performed worse with changing-state speech (sequences of different syllables) when compared with steady-state speech (one syllable repeated) and silence. Children were more impaired than adults by both speech sounds. In the spatial task, no disruptive effect of irrelevant speech was found in either group. These results indicate that irrelevant speech evokes similarity-based interference, and thus pose difficulties for the attention-capture and the changing-state account of the ISE.

The Influence of Cartoon-Soundscape Irrelevant Sound Effects on Young Children's Auditory Processing and Working Memory Skills.

Irrelevant sound or speech effect affects an individual's serial recall task of visual and auditory presentations. Cartoon soundscape mimics irrelevant sound effects. A constant and repeated exposure to cartoons in early childhood should influence children's auditory learning or recall performance. To investigate the effects of cartoons' soundscape irrelevant sound effects on young children's auditory processing and working memory skills. A cross-sectional study was used to observe the influence of the cartoon soundscape irrelevant sound effects on children. Sixty young children having hearing thresholds within 15 dB HL, in the age range 5 to 6 years, exposed to cartoons (Indian plus non-Indian) were considered for the study. Pitch pattern test (PPT), duration pattern test (DPT), and Corsi block working memory apparatus were applied to the participants exposed to cartoons. The data obtained were compared statistically in terms of the groups' performances. There was a significant difference in PPT (p = 0.023) and DPT (p = 0.001) between the exposed and nonexposed groups. In contrast, there was no significant difference between the two groups in Corsi block working memory (p > 0.05). Cartoon soundscape irrelevant sound or speech affects young children's auditory processing skills. The visual-spatial recall follows a different developmental pattern in young children without recoding to phonological aspects. It is predicted that our study findings might help determine the ill effects of cartoons on the auditory and language development process.

Process-Sensitivity of the Changing-State Effect – Three Methodological Issues Regarding the Current Evidence Base

ABSTRACT The finding that irrelevant sound that changes from one token to the next disrupts serial recall performance more strongly than steady-state sound is well established as the changing-state-effect in the auditory distraction literature. Two of the dominant accounts of irrelevant sound effects differ in whether they expect the changing-state effect to be process-sensitive. According to the duplex-mechanism account, changing-state effects are restricted to tasks in which participants process order information. According to an attentional capture account, they should occur independent of the role of order information. In this review, we give an overview of studies investigating the process-sensitivity of the changing-state effect and discuss three methodological issues with the current evidence base and how they have already been addressed in some studies. One issue concerns the difficulties arising from comparing tasks that are supposed to differ only in the necessity to retain order information, but that may also differ in other aspects. A second issue concerns the need to consider what participants actually do when performing a task rather than to rely solely on task analyses. The final issue concerns the pitfalls associated with testing for null effects. Based on these considerations, we conclude that the question of process-sensitivity is far from settled and make suggestions for how to minimize these problems in future research.

Using active noise-cancelling headphones in open-plan offices: No influence on cognitive performance but improvement of perceived privacy and acoustic environment

High speech intelligibility in open-plan offices and thus a high changing-state character of the acoustic environment have been found to negatively influence cognitive performance. This is often attributed to the so-called irrelevant speech effect. Office workers lately use active noise-cancelling (ANC) headphones to improve the acoustic situation by blocking unwanted sound. However, it is currently unknown if using ANC headphones in a noisy setting improves cognitive performance. Two studies were conducted to examine if ANC headphones improve cognitive performance and the subjective well-being of employees in an open-plan office. Cognitive performance was measured using a serial recall test. Subjective assessments were measured using a questionnaire. The participants were tested in silence, speech without headphones, speech with ANC headphones switched off and speech with ANC headphones switched on. No statistically significant differences were found between the conditions with ANC headphones switched on and off as well as without headphones for cognitive performance. However, ANC headphones statistically significantly improved subjective assessments such as perceived privacy and the assessment of the acoustic environment. The results provide a scientific basis for evaluating and planning the appropriate use of ANC headphones for concentration-intensive activities such as office work.

How do distracting events influence children’s arithmetic performance?

To understand how distraction influences children’s arithmetic performance, we examined effects of irrelevant sounds on children’s performance while they solve arithmetic problems. Third and fifth graders were asked to verify true/false, one-digit addition problems (e.g., 9 + 4 = 12. True? False?) under silence and sound conditions. The sounds began when the problems started to appear on the screen (Experiment 1; N = 76) or slightly after (Experiment 2; N = 92) and continued until participants responded. The results showed that (a) children solved arithmetic problems more quickly in the sound condition than in the silence condition when the sounds started with problem display (phasic arousal effects); (b) children were slower on the arithmetic problem verification task when the sounds was played slightly after the problems started to appear on the screen (distraction effects); (c) phasic arousal effects were found only in third graders, whereas distraction effects were found in both grades, although their magnitudes were smaller in fifth graders; (d) distraction effects increased with increasing latencies in third graders but did not change across the entire latency distribution in fifth graders; and (e) distraction effects on current trials were smaller after sound trials than after silence trials in both age groups (sequential modulations of distraction effects). These findings have important implications for furthering our understanding of effects of irrelevant sounds on arithmetic performance as well as cognitive processes involved in children’s arithmetic.

Auditory distraction can be studied online! A direct comparison between in-Person and online experimentation

ABSTRACT Referring to the well-replicated finding that the presence of to-be-ignored sound disrupts short-term memory for serially-presented visual items, the irrelevant sound effect (ISE) is an important benchmark finding within cognitive psychology. The ISE has proven useful in evaluating the structure, function and development of short-term memory. This preregistered report focused on a methodological examination of the paradigm typically used to study the ISE and sought to determine whether the ISE can be reliably studied using the increasingly popular method of online testing. Comparing Psychology students tested online, in-person and participants from an online panel, results demonstrated successful reproduction of the key signature effects of auditory distraction (the changing-state effect and the steady-state effect), albeit smaller effects with the online panel. Our results confirmed the viability of online data collection for auditory distraction research and provided important insights for the accumulation and maintenance of high data quality in internet-based experimentation.

The Irrelevant Sound Effect on Serial Recall Is Independent of Age and Inhibitory Control

ABSTRACT The Irrelevant Sound Effect (ISE) refers to the disruptive effects of irrelevant and to-be-ignored sounds on cognitive performance. It is an empirical phenomenon of great practical relevance in environments in which cognitive performance has to be achieved in the presence of task-irrelevant background sounds, e.g., in classrooms and study environments. The present study aims to test for developmental differences in susceptibility to classroom noise while taking individual inhibitory control into account. To this end, younger children (8–10 years, n 1 = 57), older children (11–12 years; n 2 = 73) and adults (19–32 years; n 3 = 52) worked on a serial recall task and a paired-associative recall task during classroom noise as irrelevant changing-state sound and during silence. We found that the serial recall performance was similarly impaired by classroom noise in all three age-groups. In contrast, disruption by classroom noise was not evident in paired-associative recall in any age group. Individual susceptibility to the detrimental noise impact was neither associated with age nor with inhibitory control as measured by means of the Stroop task. Theoretical implications of the findings for explaining developmental differences in the ISE by interference- or attention-based mechanisms are discussed.

The effect of background speech on attentive sound processing: A pupil dilation study

Listening to task-irrelevant speech while performing a cognitive task can involuntarily deviate our attention and lead to decreases in performance. One explanation for the impairing effect of irrelevant speech is that semantic processing can consume attentional resources. In the present study, we tested this assumption by measuring performance in a non-linguistic attentional task while participants were exposed to meaningful (native) and non-meaningful (foreign) speech. Moreover, based on the tight relation between pupillometry and attentional processes, we also registered changes in pupil diameter size to quantify the effect of meaningfulness upon attentional allocation. To these aims, we recruited 41 native German speakers who had neither received formal instruction in French nor had extensive informal contact with this language. The focal task consisted of an auditory oddball task. Participants performed a duration discrimination task containing frequently repeated standard sounds and rarely presented deviant sounds while a story was read in German or (non-meaningful) French in the background. Our results revealed that, whereas effects of language meaningfulness on attention were not detectable at the behavioural level, participants' pupil dilated more in response to the sounds of the auditory task when background speech was played in non-meaningful French compared to German, independent of sound type. In line with the initial hypothesis, this suggested that semantic processing of the native language required attentional resources, which lead to fewer resources devoted to the processing of the sounds of the focal task. Our results highlight the potential of the pupil dilation response for the investigation of subtle cognitive processes that might not surface when only behaviour is measured.

Doubts About the Role of Rehearsal in the Irrelevant Sound Effect.

. The irrelevant sound effect (ISE) describes the disruption of processes involved in maintaining information in working memory (WM) when irrelevant noise is present in the environment. While some posit that the ISE arises due to split obligation of attention to the irrelevant sound and the to-be-remembered information, others have argued that background noise corrupts the order of information within WM. Support for the latter position comes from research showing that the ISE appears to be most robust in tasks that emphasize ordered maintenance by a serial rehearsal strategy, and diminished when rehearsal is discouraged or precluded by task characteristics. This prior work confounds the demand for seriation with rehearsal. Thus, the present study aims to disentangle ordered maintenance from a rehearsal strategy by using a running memory span task that requires ordered output but obviates the utility of rehearsal. Across four experiments, we find a significant ISE that persists under conditions that should discourage the use of rehearsal and among individuals who self-report use of alternative strategies. These findings indicate that rehearsal is not necessary to produce an ISE in a serial recall task and thus fail to corroborate accounts of the ISE that emphasize the involvement of rehearsal.

The irrelevant speech effect in backward recall is modulated by foreknowledge of recall direction and response modality.

In backward immediate serial recall, participants recall lists of items immediately after their presentation by beginning with the last presented item and ending with the first presented one. Despite the similarities with forward recall in which participants recall the items from the first to the last presented, benchmark memory phenomena reliably found in forward recall are not constantly observed in backward recall. Here, we proposed a new framework called the encoding-retrieval matching (ERM) hypothesis to account for backward recall. The ERM retains the main features of the visuospatial hypothesis and the item-order trade-off hypothesis, the two dominant accounts of backward recall. According to the ERM, output modality and foreknowledge of recall direction influence the availability of visuospatial representations and the weight devoted to item and order processing. We tested the ERM with irrelevant speech, a well-known working memory factor disrupting forward recall. In two experiments, we manipulated recall direction (forward vs. backward), irrelevant speech (control vs. irrelevant speech), and response modality (manual vs. oral). As predicted by the ERM, when recall direction was unpredictable in Experiment 1, the magnitude of the irrelevant speech effect was larger in backward manual recall than in backward oral recall. In Experiment 2, recall direction was predictable. As predicted by the ERM, in backward recall, the irrelevant speech effect was reduced with a manual response and absent with an oral response. We concluded that ERM effectively accounts for the complex interplay between response modality, foreknowledge of recall direction, and benchmark memory effects in backward recall. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).