Effect Of The Irrelevant Speech On Chinese Sentence Reading: An Eye-tracking Study

The irrelevant speech effect (ISE) refers to the impairment of visual-information processing by background speech. Research on the ISE has focused on short-term memory for visually-presented word lists. And they favor that the ISE results from interference-by-process rather than the confusion between the contents of vocal and visual information (Marsh, Hughes & Jones,2007,2009). The present research extends this work by using measures of eye movements to examine the effect of irrelevant speech on the the reading of Chinese sentences.Experiment 1 was designed to explore whether the irrelevant speech interference Chinese sentence reading and the influence of semanticity of speech on reading. Participants either read sentences while being exposed to meaningful speech (from China Central Television News) or meaningless speech (the same speech scrambled to make it unintelligible) or silence. A target word of high or low lexical frequency was embedded in each sentence.The results were as follows:(1)Meaningful, but not meaningless, irrelevant speech disrupts sentence-level eye movement behavior, causing readers to make more fixations and regressions. (2)A word frequency effect was obtained in first fixation duration only for silent reading. But normal word frequency effects were observed in later measures in all reading conditions. These findings suggested that semantic content, rather than the acoustic properties of speech, interfered with reading. Furthermore, both meaningful and meaningless irrelevant speech interferes with early word identification.Experiment 2 aimed to further investigate whether the irrelevant speech effect results from interference-by-process or interference-by-content. A 3(background speech type:meaningful speech, meaningless speech, silence)× 2(task instruction:normal reading, proofreading) mixed design was used. The background speech type was the within-subjects factor, and the task instruction was the between-subjects factor.Be consistent with Experiment 1, we observed the irrelevant speech effect on Chinese sentence reading. The background speech (both the meaningful and the meaningless speech) reduced the accuracy of reading comprehension. While only the meaningful speech decreased the effective reading rate significantly. Furthermore, there was a trend of interaction between background type and task instruction. As the similarity between the contents of vocal and visual materials was identical, this interaction implied that it is the same process rather than the similar content determines the interruption. The present study supports the interference-by-process account.