Effects of irrelevant background speech on eye movements during reading

Abstract

The irrelevant speech effect (ISE) refers to the impairment of visual information processing by background speech. Prior research on the ISE has focused on short-term memory for visually presented word lists. The present research extends this work by using measurements of eye movements to examine effects of irrelevant background speech during Chinese reading. This enabled an examination of the ISE for a language in which access to semantic representations is not strongly mediated by phonology. Participants read sentences while exposed to meaningful irrelevant speech, meaningless speech (scrambled meaningful speech) or silence. A target word of high or low lexical frequency was embedded in each sentence. The results show that meaningful, but not meaningless, background speech produced increased re-reading. In addition, the appearance of a normal word frequency effect, characterised by longer fixation times on low-compared to highfrequency words, was delayed when meaningful or meaningless speech was present in the background. These findings show that irrelevant background speech can disrupt normal processes of reading comprehension and, in addition, that background noise can interfere with the early processing of words. The findings add to evidence showing that normal reading processes can be disrupted by environmental noise such as irrelevant background speech.

Reading is disrupted by intelligible background speech: Evidence from eye-tracking.

“…A further interesting finding from Experiment 1 was that none of the background sounds impaired participants' comprehension of the sentences, thus suggesting that whilst the efficiency with which readers were able to construct a representation of sentential meaning was reduced, readers were still able to attain an understanding of the sentence that they were reading. This is consistent with previous eye-tracking studies (Cauchard et al, 2015;Hyönä & Ekholm, 2016;Yan et al, 2017), but not with other behavioral studies (e.g. Martin et al, 1988;.…”

“…Additionally, there is conflicting evidence about which stages of the reading process are influenced by intelligible speech. For example, Hyönä and Ekholm (2016) reported that the effect of scrambled speech was mostly evident in re-reading fixations, whilst Yan et al (2017) observed the same effect for intelligible speech. These findings suggest that the effect of background speech is mostly evident in second-pass reading measures.…”

“…Finally, Yan, Meng, Liu, He, and Paterson (2017) investigated distraction effects by background speech in readers of Mandarin Chinese. Participants read single sentences with a target word lexical frequency manipulation in three background sound conditions: intelligible (i.e., Mandarin) speech, meaningless speech (the same speech scrambled in 60 ms segments), and silence.…”

Auditory Distraction During Reading: A Bayesian Meta-Analysis of a Continuing Controversy

“…Because of this, surprisingly little is known about the effect of experimental exposure to noise on reading in children. Eye-movement recordings may be particularly helpful in studying this topic because they can reveal subtle auditory-distraction effects that may not appear in behavioral measures such as comprehension accuracy ( Cauchard et al, 2012 ; Hyönä & Ekholm, 2016 ; Yan et al, 2017 ). Longitudinal studies of reading development have already made successful use of eye tracking to study such processes as the development of the perceptual span ( Sperlich, Meixner, & Laubrock, 2016 ), and this method also holds promise in understanding how children’s susceptibility to distraction may change during the school years and beyond.…”

“…However, these studies do not tell us how the reading process is influenced on a moment-to-moment basis. More recently, several eye-tracking studies have addressed this question by showing that the effect of background speech on reading can also be found at the level of fixation durations and fixation probabilities ( Cauchard, Cane, & Weger, 2012 ; Hyönä & Ekholm, 2016 ; Vasilev, Liversedge, Rowan, Kirkby, & Angele, 2017 ; Yan, Meng, Liu, He, & Paterson, 2017 ). One key finding from these studies is that background speech leads to an increased number of rereading fixations.…”