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Recall disruption produced by noise-vocoded speech: a study of the irrelevant sound effect
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2013-11-11
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The Irrelevant Sound Effect (ISE) is the finding that serial recall performance is
impaired under complex auditory backgrounds such as speech as compared to white noise
or silence (Colle & Welsh, 1976). Much of the current research investigates the role of
changing-state complexity of the background stimuli in ISE (e.g., Jones & Macken,
1993). This study investigated whether speech-specific qualities of the irrelevant
background have an effect on the ISE. This was done using noise-vocoded speech, an
acoustic transformation that removes many of the acoustic properties of speech while
preserving the speech intensity profile. Experiment 1 compared serial recall accuracy
resulting from white noise and noise-vocoded speech backgrounds and found that noisevocoded
speech is more disruptive. Noise-vocoded speech preserves the intensity profile
of nature speech with a number of amplitude channels; each channel matches the average
intensity for the corresponding channel in natural speech. Experiment 2 systematically
varied the resolution of noise-vocoded speech by adjusting the number of these channels.
These results show that ISE varies based on the number of channels in noise-vocoded
speech, but this change in disruption is not consistent across channel conditions. Results
demonstrate that changing state complexity alone is not a sufficient explanation of ISE.
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