This suggests that the magnitude of the effect will diminish ---This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.Appl Cognit Psychol. 2019;33:537-543.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/acp 537 accordingly as the distance between the location of the distractor and the location of the focal task increases.The role of sound source location is of interest for the architecture and design of work environments, like open-plan offices, as employees can be exposed to background speech coming from different and multiple directions. That makes it relevant to apply the principles of cross-modal attention on a task more relevant for office work, that is, writing. One of the purposes of the present study was to explore the role of sound source location in the effects of background speech on an office-related task (ie, writing). Based on the findings by Buchner et al. (2008) and Spence et al. (2000), we expected that irrelevant speech from the front would be more distracting compared with irrelevant speech from behind, especially for speech with high intelligibility.