Recall of Speech is Impaired by Subsequent Masking Noise: A Replication of Experiment 2

Abstract

Introduction: The presence of masking noise can impair speech intelligibility and increase the attentional and cognitive resources necessary to understand speech. The first study to demonstrate the negative cognitive effects of noisy speech found that participants had poorer recall for aurally-presented digits early in a list when later digits were presented in noise relative to quiet (Rabbitt, 1968). However, despite being cited nearly 500 times and providing the foundation for a wealth of subsequent research on the topic, the original study has never been directly replicated.

Methods: This study replicated Rabbitt (1968) with a large online sample and tested its robustness to a variety of analytical and scoring techniques.

Results: We replicated Rabbitt's key finding that listening to speech in noise impairs recall for items that came earlier in the list. The results were consistent when we used the original analytical technique (an ANOVA) and a more powerful analytical technique (generalized linear mixed effects models) that was not available when the original paper was published.

Discussion: These findings support the claim that effortful listening can interfere with encoding or rehearsal of previously presented information.

Keywords: listening effort; recall; replication; spoken word recognition.

Figure 1:

Left: Design schematic of the four noise conditions (clear/clear, noise/clear, clear/noise, noise/noise) in Rabbitt (1968). On each trial, participants heard the first half and the second half of each list in either noise or silence (“clear”) and were then cued to recall one or the other. Right: Example “clear-noise” trial in which participants heard the first half of the list without masking noise and the second half with noise and were then asked to recall the first half.

Figure 2.

Violin plot depicting distribution of absolute recall of first-half lists (out of 7) by noise condition of second-half list. Black points indicate means for each condition, grey squares indicate the mean values reported in Rabbitt (1968).