Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Task-irrelevant background speech or sounds are known to have detrimental effects on task performance which are calledirrelevant-speech/sound effects (ISEs). In this study, we have investigated the contributing factor responsible for magnitudeof ISE focusing on the meaningfulness of the background noise and working memory capacity (WMC). Participants wereasked to perform reading comprehension task (Exp. 1), serial recall task (Exp 2), and match-to-sample task (Exp.3)with or without task-irrelevant instrumental music and lyrics, and their WMC was measured with the Reading SpanTest. The results revealed that the irrelevant sounds with lyrics, but not instrumental music disrupted the performanceof the participants in both the reading comprehension and serial recall tasks , while that in match-to-sample task was notinterfered by either sound types. The moderating effect of WMC was not observed in any experiments. The results impliedthat ISEs were observed when phonological loop was used to conduct these tasks. Based on these results, the function ofa learners WMC in the ISE is discussed.