Phonological similarity and the irrelevant speech effect: Implications for models of short-term verbal memory

Abstract

Three experiments studied the interaction between irrelevant speech and phonological similarity within both the remembered and the irrelevant auditory material. Phonological similarity within the remembered list impaired performance in both baseline and irrelevant speech conditions, whereas phonological similarity between the remembered and ignored irrelevant items did not influence performance. Although there was a tendency for similarity within the irrelevant items to reduce interference, this proved to be a less robust finding. Implications for the theoretical interpretation of the irrelevant speech effect are discussed.

Irrelevant speech, articulatory suppression, and phonological similarity: A test of the phonological loop model and the feature model

“…Consequently, Salamé and Baddeley's (1986) account can explain the absence of an effect of phonological similarity in the presence of irrelevant speech in these studies also by assuming that many participants abandoned a phonologicalcoding strategy. Salamé and Baddeley's (1986) account is also consistent with the results of Larsen et al (2000), who showed additive effects of irrelevant speech and phonological similarity in two experiments that employed relatively short sequences (six items per list).…”

“…As was pointed out earlier in the paper, some of the availableevidence (Jones & Macken, 1995;Larsen et al, 2000;Salamé & Baddeley, 1986) is consistent with the phonological loop model because it demonstrates a detrimental effect of phonological similarity on the recall of visually presented list items when participants are exposed to irrelevant speech. In other studies employing visual presentation of target materials (Colle & Welsh, 1976;Surprenant et al, 1999), however, there was no effect of phonological similarity in the presence of irrelevant speech.…”

“…The findings of Jones and Macken (1995) have sometimes been interpreted (e.g., Larsen et al, 2000) as being similar to those of Colle and Welsh (1976). In fact, Jones and Macken (Experiment 4) reported significant main effects of phonologicalsimilarity and irrelevant speech together with a nonsignificant interaction between these variables.…”

The irrelevant speech effect: a PET study

“…It is clearly not due to simple masking effects as irrelevant items that are similar in sound to the remembered material cause no more disruption than dissimilar irrelevant sounds (Jones & Macken, 1995a, 1995bLarsen, Baddeley, & Andrade, 2000;LeCompte & Shaibe, 1997;Surprenant, Neath, & LeCompte, 1999). There is also a broad agreement with the view that disruption occurs principally when the irrelevant sound fluctuates, termed the 'changing-state hypothesis' by Jones (Jones, 1993;Jones et al, 1992aJones et al, , 1992bJones & Tremblay, 2000).…”

The irrelevant sound effect in short-term memory: Is there developmental change?

“…Originally, it was assumed that irrelevant sounds partially mask memory traces within the phonological store (Salamé & Baddeley, 1982, 1989. This view was later abandoned, as it is not in line with major characteristics of the ISE, such as its evocation by nonspeech sounds (Elliott, 2002;Jones & Macken, 1993), the impact of the sounds' changing state, and the finding that the ISE with speech is unaffected by the phonological similarity between the irrelevant speech and the memory items (Jones & Macken, 1995;Larsen, Baddeley, & Andrade, 2000). A more recent version of the phonological loop interpretation assumes that irrelevant sounds draw on domain-specific resources which build up a representation of the order in the to-be-remembered list (Page & Norris, 2003).…”