Irrelevant speech does not interfere with serial recall in early blind listeners

Abstract

Phonological working memory is known be (a) inversely related to the duration of the items to be learned (word-length effect), and (b) impaired by the presence of irrelevant speech-like sounds (irrelevant-speech effect). As it is discussed controversially whether these memory disruptions are subject to attentional control, both effects were studied in sighted participants and in a sample of early blind individuals who are expected to be superior in selectively attending to auditory stimuli. Results show that, while performance depended on word length in both groups, irrelevant speech interfered with recall only in the sighted group, but not in blind participants. This suggests that blind listeners may be able to effectively prevent irrelevant sound from being encoded in the phonological store, presumably due to superior auditory processing. The occurrence of a word-length effect, however, implies that blind and sighted listeners are utilizing the same phonological rehearsal mechanism in order to maintain information in the phonological store.

Keywords:

• Irrelevant-sound effect
• Working memory
• Irrelevant speech
• Blind
• Sighted

We are indebted to Josephine Berger and Christopher-John Gawe for their assistance in recruiting the participants and collecting the data.

Notes

¹Whereas sighted participants responded faster to the first ( ms) and last ( ms) words than to words in the middle of the list (, 1039, 1250, and 1333 ms, respectively), response times seemed to increase monotonically with the serial position in blind listeners (, 1260, 1328, 1361, 1365, and 1768 ms, respectively).