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Noisy speech impairs retention of previously heard information only at short time scales

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Abstract

When speech is presented in noise, listeners must recruit cognitive resources to resolve the mismatch between the noisy input and representations in memory. A consequence of this effortful listening is impaired memory for content presented earlier. In the first study on effortful listening, Rabbitt, The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 20, 241–248 (1968; Experiment 2) found that recall for a list of digits was poorer when subsequent digits were presented with masking noise than without. Experiment 3 of that study extended this effect to more naturalistic, passage-length materials. Although the findings of Rabbitt’s Experiment 2 have been replicated multiple times, no work has assessed the robustness of Experiment 3. We conducted a replication attempt of Rabbitt’s Experiment 3 at three signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). Results at one of the SNRs (Experiment 1a of the current study) were in the opposite direction from what Rabbitt, The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 20, 241–248, (1968) reported – that is, speech was recalled more accurately when it was followed by speech presented in noise rather than in the clear – and results at the other two SNRs showed no effect of noise (Experiments 1b and 1c). In addition, reanalysis of a replication of Rabbitt’s seminal finding in his second experiment showed that the effect of effortful listening on previously presented information is transient. Thus, effortful listening caused by noise appears to only impair memory for information presented immediately before the noise, which may account for our finding that noise in the second-half of a long passage did not impair recall of information presented in the first half of the passage.

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Notes

  1. Note that the accounts described here are those that have been proposed to explain the effects of unintelligible noise (e.g., speech-shaped noise, white noise) on recall of speech; other explanations have been proposed when the masking consists of speech (e.g., multi-talker babble). For example, phonological and semantic information in the masker may interfere with encoding of the target speech, and segregating the target speech and masker streams may draw resources away from encoding (see Heinrich et al., 2008).

  2. A potential concern is that by presenting the questions in a random order, the first questions may refer to content from the end of the second half of the passage, meaning they could conceivably be answered by drawing on information from working memory rather than long-term memory. However, our focus is on how well participants retain information from the first half of the passage – which ended more than 2 min before the questions were presented. Therefore, regardless of the order in which the questions are asked, participants must draw on long-term memory to answer questions about the first half of the passage.

  3. A likelihood ratio test indicated that excluding this random slope did not significantly affect model fit (see R script for more details).

  4. A likelihood ratio test indicated that excluding these random slopes did not significantly affect model fit (see R script for details).

  5. Note that although the odds ratio for the effect of noise appears to be numerically lower in position 1 than in positions 2 and 3 in Fig. 2, re-leveling the interaction model such that position 1 is coded as the reference level reveals that that the effect of noise is not significantly stronger in position 1 than in the middle two positions.

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Funding

This work was supported by Carleton College and the National Institutes of Health via the National Institute on Deafness and Communication Disorders (R15-DC018114; R15-DC018114-02). We are grateful to Claire Guang, Naseem Dillman-Hasso, Helen Hu, and Gigi Paulig for technical assistance and research support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Carleton College, Northfield, MN, USA

    Violet A. Brown, Katrina Sewell, Jed Villanueva & Julia F. Strand

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  1. Violet A. Brown
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  2. Katrina Sewell
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  4. Julia F. Strand
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Correspondence to Violet A. Brown.

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Open Practices Statement

All data, code for analysis, and stimuli are available via the Open Science Framework at: https://osf.io/znv7a/, and the preregistration document for Experiment 1 at: https://osf.io/bj3tw. Experiment 2 was a reanalysis of existing data from our lab and was not preregistered.

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Brown, V.A., Sewell, K., Villanueva, J. et al. Noisy speech impairs retention of previously heard information only at short time scales. Mem Cogn (2024). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-024-01583-y

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