Kreitewolf Jens, Wöstmann Malte, Tune Sarah, Plöchl Michael, Obleser Jonas
Department of Psychology, University of Lübeck, Lübeck, Germany.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2019 May;81(4):1108-1118. doi: 10.3758/s13414-019-01727-2.
When one is listening, familiarity with an attended talker's voice improves speech comprehension. Here, we instead investigated the effect of familiarity with a distracting talker. In an irrelevant-speech task, we assessed listeners' working memory for the serial order of spoken digits when a task-irrelevant, distracting sentence was produced by either a familiar or an unfamiliar talker (with rare omissions of the task-irrelevant sentence). We tested two groups of listeners using the same experimental procedure. The first group were undergraduate psychology students (N = 66) who had attended an introductory statistics course. Critically, each student had been taught by one of two course instructors, whose voices served as the familiar and unfamiliar task-irrelevant talkers. The second group of listeners were family members and friends (N = 20) who had known either one of the two talkers for more than 10 years. Students, but not family members and friends, made more errors when the task-irrelevant talker was familiar versus unfamiliar. Interestingly, the effect of talker familiarity was not modulated by the presence of task-irrelevant speech: Students experienced stronger working memory disruption by a familiar talker, irrespective of whether they heard a task-irrelevant sentence during memory retention or merely expected it. While previous work has shown that familiarity with an attended talker benefits speech comprehension, our findings indicate that familiarity with an ignored talker disrupts working memory for target speech. The absence of this effect in family members and friends suggests that the degree of familiarity modulates the memory disruption.
当一个人在倾听时，熟悉被关注说话者的声音会提高言语理解能力。在此，我们转而研究熟悉干扰说话者的影响。在一项无关言语任务中，当一个与任务无关的干扰性句子由熟悉或不熟悉的说话者说出时（很少遗漏无关句子），我们评估了听众对口语数字序列顺序的工作记忆。我们使用相同的实验程序测试了两组听众。第一组是修过统计学入门课程的本科心理学专业学生（N = 66）。关键的是，每个学生都由两位课程教师中的一位授课，这两位教师的声音分别作为熟悉和不熟悉的无关任务说话者。第二组听众是认识这两位说话者中一位超过10年的家庭成员和朋友（N = 20）。当无关任务说话者是熟悉的而非不熟悉时，学生而非家庭成员和朋友犯的错误更多。有趣的是，说话者熟悉度的影响并未因无关言语的存在而受到调节：无论学生在记忆保持期间是否听到无关句子，还是仅仅预期会听到，熟悉的说话者都会对他们的工作记忆造成更强的干扰。虽然先前的研究表明熟悉被关注的说话者有益于言语理解，但我们的研究结果表明熟悉被忽略的说话者会干扰对目标言语的工作记忆。家庭成员和朋友中不存在这种效应表明熟悉程度会调节记忆干扰。
