Noisy speech impairs retention of previously heard information only at short time scales

When speech is presented in noise, listeners must recruit cognitive resources to resolve the mismatch between the noisy input and representations in memory. A consequence of this effortful listening is impaired memory for content presented earlier. In the first study on effortful listening, Rabbitt, The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 20, 241-248 (1968; Experiment 2) found that recall for a list of digits was poorer when subsequent digits were presented with masking noise than without. Experiment 3 of that study extended this effect to more naturalistic, passage-length materials. Although the findings of Rabbitt’s Experiment 2 have been replicated multiple times, no work has assessed the robustness of Experiment 3. We conducted a replication attempt of Rabbitt’s Experiment 3 at three signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). Results at one of the SNRs (Experiment 1a of the current study) were in the opposite direction from what Rabbitt, The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 20, 241-248, (1968) reported - that is, speech was recalled more accurately when it was followed by speech presented in noise rather than in the clear - and results at the other two SNRs showed no effect of noise (Experiments 1b and 1c). In addition, reanalysis of a replication of Rabbitt’s seminal finding in his second experiment showed that the effect of effortful listening on previously presented information is transient. Thus, effortful listening caused by noise appears to only impair memory for information presented immediately before the noise, which may account for our finding that noise in the second-half of a long passage did not impair recall of information presented in the first half of the passage.

Recall of Speech is Impaired by Subsequent Masking Noise: A Replication of Rabbitt (1968) Experiment 2

The presence of masking noise can impair speech intelligibility and increase the cognitive resources necessary to understand speech. The first study to demonstrate the negative cognitive consequences of noisy speech—published by Rabbitt in 1968—found that participants had poorer recall for aurally presented digits early in a list when later digits were presented in noise relative to quiet. However, despite being cited nearly 500 times and providing the foundation for a wealth of subsequent research on the topic, the original study has never been directly replicated. Here we report a replication attempt of that study with a large online sample and tested the robustness of the results to a variety of scoring and analytical techniques. We replicated the key finding that listening to speech in noise impairs recall for items that came earlier in the list. The results were consistent when we used the original analytical technique (an ANOVA) and a more powerful analytical technique (generalized linear mixed effects models) that was not available when the original paper was published. These findings support the claim that effortful listening can interfere with encoding or rehearsal of previously presented information.