Disruption by speech of serial short-term memory: The role of changing-state vowels

Abstract

Serial short-term memory is markedly impaired by the presence of irrelevant speech so long as the successive tokens within the irrelevant speech are phonologically (or acoustically) dissimilar (Jones & Macken, 1995b). In two experiments in which consonant-vowel-consonant syllables were used as irrelevant speech tokens, we sought to evaluate the relative disruptive potency of changes in the final consonant only (Experiment 1), in the initial consonant, or in the vowel portion (Experiment 2) of each token. The results suggest that the vowel changes are the dominant source of disruption. This dominance may be explained, at least in part, by the role played by vowel sounds in the perceptual organization of speech and, in turn, the particular propensity for vowel changes to yield information about serial order. The results are consistent also with the view that the factors that promote order encoding in sound are also the ones that promote disruption.

Directly assessing the relationship between irrelevant speech and irrelevant tapping.

“…For example, a single repeated item (e.g., B B B B) will produce less of a decrement than a sequence of different items (e.g., A B C D). A similar pattern holds for changes within an item (Hughes, Tremblay, & Jones, 2005).…”

When distraction helps: Evidence that concurrent articulation and irrelevant speech can facilitate insight problem solving

“…Furthermore the similar magnitude of the benefits for insight problem solving arising from articulatory suppression and irrelevant speech seems to implicate a common factor underpinning the facilitation effect. This factor is presumably linked to the way in which articulatory suppression and irrelevant speech both interfere with processes such as speech planning and subvocal rehearsal (e.g., Hughes et al, 2005Hughes et al, , 2013Repovš & Baddeley, 2006). The evidence that the verbal overshadowing effect may have a temporal dimension is important given current controversies surrounding the reality of the verbal overshadowing phenomenon in the context of insight problem solving (e.g., Ball & Stevens, 2009;Chein & Weisberg, 2014;Chein et al, 2010;Fleck & Weisberg, 2004.…”

“…One effect, referred to as "interference-by-process" (Hughes et al, 2013), arises from a conflict between the obligatory processing of irrelevant speech and the speech-based processing deployed to perform the target task (e.g., Hughes, Tremblay, & Jones, 2005). The other effect, referred to as "attentional capture" (Hughes et al, 2013), concerns the disruption of processing arising simply because irrelevant speech draws attention away from the target task.…”

Cognitive control of auditory distraction: Impact of task difficulty, foreknowledge, and working memory capacity supports duplex-mechanism account.

“…conflict between the obligatory processing of the sound and the processing deployed to perform the focal task (e.g., Hughes, Tremblay, & Jones, 2005;. Such interferenceby-process has been demonstrated mainly using a serial recall task in which a short list of (usually visually presented) items (e.g., digits or letters) must be reproduced in serial order.…”