ISSN : 1226-9654
The irrelevant speech effect refers to the finding of impaired serial recall performance in the presence of irrelevant speech sounds. In the irrelevant speech effect procedure, participants must recall immediately short sequences of visually presented digits while trying to ignore irrelevant background noise. The purpose of this study was to assess whether individual difference in working memory capacity influences the magnitude of the irrelevant speech effect. Based on the Operation-word span task by Turner & Enlge(1989), students were divided into high and low working memory capacity groups and participated in experiments of the irrelevant speech effect. Experiment 1 revealed not only a clear irrelevant speech effect in both groups but also a significant interaction between irrelevant speech effect and working memory capacity: low working memory span group showed significantly stronger effect of irrelevant speech than high working memory span group. In Experiment 2, the number of digits to recall was adjusted to participants' individual memory span in oder to control of the group effect. In contrary to Experiment 1, it was found that the irrelevant speech effect did not interact with working memory capacity. An alternative explanation of our results was discussed.
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