Backgrounds

Do you sometimes read in a noisy coffee shop or office? Do you like to listen to music when you learn or memorize something? Do you sometimes find that you cannot focus your attention on a noisy environment?

Background sounds have a disruptive effect on our ability to remember things. It has been shown that speech is the sound that has the most disruptive effects. This phenomenon was called as Irrelevant speech effect (ISE; Colle & Welsh,1976; Salamé & Baddeley, 1982).

Past research has focused on the disruptive effects of non-tonal languages (e.g., English and Spanish) on memory. There is very little research investigated the impact of a tonal language (e.g., Mandarin and Cantonese) on memory.

Recruitment criteria

We will use several different languages to study the disruptive effects of speech on visual memory. Thus, we are looking to recruit normal-hearing participants with different native languages, aged 18-40 years. 

Expected outcomes

The outcomes of this research will improve our understanding of the negative impact of background noise on our ability to remember visual information. Results could inform interventions for people with different native languages who find other peoples' conversations distracting or disturbing when working in open-plan offices, or other places with high levels of background speech noise.

My PhD research aims to answer the following:

• Do irrelevant tonal language sounds and language experience of participants affect the size of the ISE?
• Which frequency region is the main region for irrelevant sounds to produce ISE?
• For Mandarin speakers, do to-be-remembered symbols will result in more ISE than to-be-remembered digits?

The hypotheses of my project are:

Experiment 1

1a Native Mandarin speakers experience more ISE than native English speakers.

1b Mandarin and Cantonese produce more ISE than English.

If both hypotheses are accepted, it is necessary to investigate whether the tonal language speakers have more ISE in tonal language sounds than in non-tonal language sounds and whether the non-tonal language speakers have equivalent ISE in both sounds.

1c Native Mandarin speakers experience more ISE than native English speakers when listening to Mandarin background sounds.

1d Native Mandarin speakers experience more ISE than native English speakers when listening to Cantonese background sounds.

1e Native Mandarin speakers experience most ISE in Mandarin (native, tonal) sounds and least ISE in English (non-native, nontonal) sounds.

1f Native English speakers experience most ISE in English (native, non-tonal) sounds.

Experiment 2 (provisory)

2a Mid frequency region is the main region for English background speech to produce ISE.

2b High frequency region is the main region for Mandarin background speech to produce ISE.

Experiment 3 (provisory)

3a For native Mandarin speakers, to-be-remembered symbols will result in more ISE than to-be-remembered digits when the irrelevant sound is English speech.

3b For native Mandarin speakers, to-be-remembered symbols will result in more ISE than to-be-remembered digits when the irrelevant sound is Mandarin speech.

If you are interested in this project, please contact Yupeng Wu,

yupeng.wu@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk