The irrelevant-speech effect and children: theoretical implications of developmental change

Elliott, Emily M.

doi:10.3758/bf03194948

Cited by 138 publications

(214 citation statements)

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“…In both experiments, children and adults were equally impaired by irrelevant speech. This contrasts with a related study (differences in methodology) by Elliott (2002), who reported severe increase in the detrimental impact of irrelevant speech with decreasing age. In both experiments, classroom noise had no effect in overall analyses.…”

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confidence: 53%

“…This so-called ''irrelevant sound effect'' (ISE) was found for irrelevant background speech as well as for nonspeech sounds such as tones (e.g., Divin, Coyle, & James, 2001;Elliott, 2002;Jones & Macken, 1993) and instrumental music (Klatte, Kilcher, & Hellbrü ck, 1995;Schlittmeier, Hellbrü ck, & Klatte, 2008). However, the occurrence of the ISE has been shown to depend on the inherent properties of the irrelevant sound.…”

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

Klatte

Lachmann

Schlittmeier

et al. 2010

European Journal of Cognitive Psychology

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With two experiments, effects of irrelevant speech and classroom noise on serial recall of common nouns presented pictorially were investigated in children and adults. Experiment 1 used fixed list lengths for children (first graders) and adults. Experiment 2 used list lengths adjusted to participants' (secondÁthird graders, adults) individual spans. In both experiments, children and adults were equally impaired by irrelevant speech. This contrasts with a related study (differences in methodology) by Elliott (2002), who reported severe increase in the detrimental impact of irrelevant speech with decreasing age. In both experiments, classroom noise had no effect in overall analyses. For Experiment 1, however, separate group analyses revealed impairment in children. Results suggest that effects of irrelevant sounds on serial recall stem from two separate mechanisms: Specific interference due to the sounds' automatic access to short-term memory, and/or attention capture. Only for the latter there is developmental change.

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confidence: 99%

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

Klatte

Lachmann

Schlittmeier

et al. 2010

European Journal of Cognitive Psychology

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“…This calls into question the extent to which attentional drift can account for the appearance of the irrelevant sound effect. Attentional drift (or lack of attentional control) does, however, provide an elegant explanation for Elliott's (2002) finding that young children are more susceptible to irrelevant speech effects than are older children and adults. Thus, alternative explanations for the failure to find the anticipated relationship between the irrelevant sound effect must be considered before any strong conclusions are justified.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Beaman¹

2004

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

119

172

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High-span individuals (as measured by the operation span [OSPAN] technique) are less likely than lowspan individuals to notice their own names in an unattended auditory stream (A. R. A. Conway, N. Cowan, & M. F. Bunting, 2001). The possibility that OSPAN accounts for individual differences in auditory distraction on an immediate recall test was examined. There was no evidence that high-OSPAN participants were more resistant to the disruption caused by irrelevant speech in serial or in free recall. Low-OSPAN participants did, however, make more semantically related intrusion errors from the irrelevant sound stream in a free recall test (Experiment 4). Results suggest that OSPAN mediates semantic components of auditory distraction dissociable from other aspects of the irrelevant sound effect. I thank Al Harvey for critical readings of earlier versions of this article, Natalie Lynch for running Experiment 3, and Sophie Scott for useful discussions. Nelson Cowan and Emily Elliott suggested Experiment 3.

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“…Proponents of executive load models of distraction (Buchner et al, 2004;Buchner & Erdfelder, 2005;Cowan, 1995;Elliott, 2002) argue that the semantic properties of the irrelevant sound disrupt through their depletion of a limited executive (or 'attentional') resource that is necessary for the successful completion of the focal task. The key findings of the current series that go against this general executive load account are that: a) the typicality of responses is reduced by semantic similarity; given that retrieval of atypical (or low dominance) items is associated with greater executive control (e.g., Schmidt, 1996), the putative impairment of executive control by semantic distraction may be expected to affect particularly low-dominance exemplar retrieval and not, as was found in Experiment 3, high-dominance exemplar retrieval; and b), more critically, the meaningfulness of irrelevant sound does not impair phonemic fluency.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This suggests that semantic distraction effects in semantic fluency are unlikely to be due to depletion of a generalpurpose executive resource (cf. Buchner & Erdfelder, 2005;Cowan, 1995;Elliott, 2002; see also Neath, 2000). Rather, the effects seem to arise because of the disruption of processes related to the semantic activation of candidate items.…”

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Retrieval from memory: Vulnerable or inviolable?

Jones¹,

Marsh²,

Hughes³

2012

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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We show that retrieval from semantic memory is vulnerable even to the mere presence of speech. Irrelevant speech impairs semantic fluency-namely lexical retrieval cued by a semantic category name-more than meaningless speech (reversed speech or nonwords). Moreover, speech related semantically to the retrieval category is more disruptive than unrelated speech. That phonemic fluency-in which participants are cued with the first letter of words they are to report-was not disrupted by the mere presence of speech, only by speech in a related phonemic category, suggests that distraction is not mediated by executive processing load. The pattern of sensitivity to different properties of sound as a function of the type of retrieval cue is in line with an interference-by-process approach to auditory distraction.Keywords: Auditory Distraction, Lexical Retrieval, Semantic Fluency, Phonemic Fluency Retrieval and Distraction 3 Lexical retrieval is a fundamental capacity of language that underpins oral and written language production, involving the access and selection of context-appropriate lexical items to express an intended meaning. One of the most frequently-used tests of lexical retrieval is semantic fluency, in which a semantic category cue is given (e.g., 'Animals') and the task is to retrieve from long-term semantic memory as many examples as possible from that category (Bousfield & Sedgewick, 1944;Newcombe, 1969). We ask whether this process of search by semantic criterion is vulnerable to the presence of concurrent to-be-ignored sound, given that there is a body of work suggesting that retrieval processes generally are largely inviolable to all but the most attentionally-demanding concurrent tasks (Craik, Govoni, Naveh-Benjamin, & N. D. Anderson, 1996). We also attempt to discover how the lexical and semantic status of the sound's contents determine the degree to which semantic fluency is impaired, with a view to revealing the level of abstraction at which distraction occurs. Phonemic fluency (e.g., Benton, 1968), in which the criterion for production is phonemic, not semantic, is also studied in order to provide baseline conditions that share some processes-including key executive processes-with semantic fluency, but not those related to semantic retrieval. This allows examination of whether semantic auditory distraction has a process-specific effect on semantic retrieval, namely whether it only occurs when the focal task also requires semantic (but not phonemic) retrieval, or whether common (executive) processes are vulnerable.Fluency tasks have not been used to study auditory distraction and the work reported here is the first of its kind. Their attraction as a research tool for students of distraction is that they are relatively process-pure in terms of retrieval. Evidence collected so far relating to disruption by sound of lexical-semantic processing has used, almost exclusively, list-based tasks, ones that are not to the same degree process-pure as the fluency task. Because they are list-based, perform...

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The irrelevant-speech effect and children: theoretical implications of developmental change

Cited by 138 publications

References 54 publications

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

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

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

Retrieval from memory: Vulnerable or inviolable?

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