The importance of semantic similarity to the irrelevant speech effect

Abstract

Irrelevant speech disrupts immediate recall of a short sequence of items. Salame and Baddeley (1982) found a very small and nonsignificant increase in the irrelevant speech effect when the speech comprised items semantically identical to the to-be-remembered items, leading subsequent researchers to conclude that semantic similarity plays no role in the irrelevant speech effect. Experiment 1 showed that strong free associates of the to-be-remembered items disrupted serial recall to a greater extent than words that were dissimilar to the to-be-remembered items. Experiment 2 showed that this same pattern of disruption in a free recall task. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.A robust finding in immediate memory is that, despite explicit instructions to the contrary, background speech significantly disrupts short-term memory (e.g., Colle & Welsh, 1976;Jones, Madden, & Miles, 1992;LeCompte, 1994LeCompte, , 1995LeCompte, , 1996Salame & Baddeley, 1982). A typical irrelevant speech effect experiment could be described as follows: Participants are presented with a list of seven to nine items on a computer screen at a rate of one or two items per second. During the visual presentation, participants hear either nothing or spoken words. After the presentation of the visual items, participants are asked to recall these items in serial order-that is, in the order they were presented. The typical finding is that recall of the visual items is significantly worse with the speech background than with the quiet background. Note, however, that although the irrelevant speech effect is usually demonstrated with visual stimuli, it is also found with auditory stimuli (see, e.g., LeCompte, 1996), and although irrelevant speech is the usual disruptive agent, tones have also been shown to disrupt memory (see, e.g., Jones & Macken, 1993), although to a lesser extent than speech (LeCompte, Neely, & Wilson, 1997).Perhaps the most basic question about the irrelevant speech effect concerns the mechanism by which irrelevant speech interferes with short-term memory. Two theories have been proposed to explain this interference. Each theory offers a different mechanism for the interference.The first theory, the phonological store hypothesis of Baddeley (1982, 1989), proposes a store that holds information in a strictly phonological form. According to the hypothesis, speech has obligatory access to the phonological store. Visual information also enters 37this store, but it must be coded phonologically through an active process ofsubvocal rehearsal. While these two types of information are together in the phonological store, the auditory information interferes with the visual information, thereby degrading recall of the visual information. The degree of interference is a function of the phonological similarity between the background speech and the visual information.The second theory, the changing state theory of Jones and his colleagues (e.g., Jones, 1993Jones, , 1995Jones, Beaman, & Macken, 1996;Jones & Macken, 1993; Jones ...

The Irrelevant Sound Phenomenon Revisited: What Role for Working Memory Capacity?

“…First, they demonstrate that with different types of recall test (free recall) and auditory distracter (semantically related), the OSPAN measure still fails to distinguish between individuals who suffer from high or low levels of irrelevant sound interference when the dependent measure is the number of correct recalls. Second, the results are the first replication of Neely and LeCompte's (1999) demonstration of semantically mediated irrelevant speech effects in free recall, and they extend the findings of those authors in also showing a reliable effect of intrusion by irrelevant speech items into the free recall protocols in relatedspeech conditions. Third, and most importantly, the results demonstrate that intrusions from semantically related irrelevant speech occur more frequently among low-than high-OSPAN participants, providing a conceptual replication previously lacking for the results of Conway et al (2001) and also suggesting a means by which the results of this experimental series can be reconciled with the data from Conway et al's dichotic listening task.…”

“…If OSPAN reflects the ability to reject stimuli at a different stage in processing than that represented by the irrelevant sound distracters, possibly during semantic analysis, high-span participants could exclude the highly meaningful stimulus in Conway et al's cocktail party paradigm quite efficiently but this capability would be of no use in attempting to ignore the rather less meaningful stimuli (nonwords and tones) of Experiments 2 to 3. In accordance, Experiment 4 used a modification of Neely and LeCompte's (1999) free recall procedure to determine whether OSPAN could account for the effects of irrelevant speech at the semantic level.…”

Sound source location modulates the irrelevant-sound effect

“…The present results also add to the growing body of evidence of an attentional involvement in the irrelevant-sound effect (Buchner & Erdfelder, 2005;Buchner et al, 2006;Buchner et al, 2004;Elliott, 2002;Lange, 2005;Neely & LeCompte, 1999). Like those results, the finding that the irrelevant-sound effect is modulated by the proximity of the auditory distractors to the direction of attention can be readily explained within the embedded-processes model of working memory (Cowan, 1995(Cowan, , 1999) and the feature model (Nairne, 1990;Neath, 2000), because both models comprise an attentional component.…”

“…Assuming that attentional control improves during this time period, Elliott suggested that this was evidence of an involvement of attention in the genesis of the irrelevant-sound effect. Neely and LeCompte (1999) showed that a strong semantic association between visual targets and auditory distractors may play a role for serial recall performance (but see Buchner, Irmen, & Erdfelder, 1996;LeCompte & Shaibe, 1997, for conflicting results). Buchner and Erdfelder (2005) showed that the frequency of auditory distractor words may affect the serial recall of Procedure.…”

Working memory and the guidance of visual attention: Consonance-driven orienting

“…In addition, this account seems a bit stretched with respect to Experiment 2. There, the prime never occurred among the three test words, and it seems doubtful that searching for and finding a semantically related word really would facilitate maintaining the memorized item; one might even expect similar materials to produce strong interference (see, e.g., Neely & LeCompte, 1999).…”