Modeling the Effects of Irrelevant Speech on Memory

The feature model (Nairne, 1990) is extended to account for the effects of irrelevant speech and concomitant interactions in immediate serial recall. In the feature model, both articulatory suppression and irrelevant speech are seen as adding noise to the memory representation, the difference being that articulatory suppression diverts more resources than does irrelevant speech. The addition of noise impairs recall because it reduces the probability of successful redintegration. When a competitor is incorrectly recalled, rather than the correct item, this competitor is recalled out of order, producing an increase in order errors. Six simulations are reported that show that the model accounts for (1) the impairment by both irrelevant speech and articulatory suppression, (2) the irrelevance of the phonological and semantic composition of the irrelevant speech, (3) greater disruption when the irrelevant speech tokens vary, (4) the abolition of the phonological similarity effect for visual, but not for auditory, items, (5) the abolition of the word length effect for both visual and auditory items, and (6) the abolition of the irrelevant speech effect under articulatory suppression for both visual and auditory items. The feature model is compared with the two other major views of irrelevant speech, the phonological store hypothesis and the changing state hypothesis.