The Influence Of Background Sound Proficiency On The Unrelated Speech Effect In Reading

Daily reading activities are not always in a completely silent environment and are often interfered with by irrelevant sounds.The phenomenon of ongoing cognitive tasks being interfered with by background language presented simultaneously is called the irrelevant language effect.The theories of irrelevant speech effects in reading mainly include the content interference hypothesis and the process interference hypothesis.The difference lies in whether background language interferes with reading due to audio-visual phonetic similarity or the semantic properties of background language.Research has found that the proficiency of background language and task difficulty have a significant impact on the effect of irrelevant language,but previous studies on the manipulation of proficiency are not precise,and there is also little research on the impact of reading material difficulty on irrelevant language effects.This study introduces three languages with different proficiency levels and audiovisual phonetic similarities for participants as background language,and controls the difficulty of reading materials to explore the influencing factors and mechanisms of irrelevant language effects.The paper includes two studies.Study 1 uses eye tracking technology to explore the effects of proficiency in background language and task difficulty on irrelevant speech effects in Chinese sentence reading.Including two sub experiments,Experiment 1explores the irrelevant language effects of Han Chinese college students reading simple Chinese sentences;Experiment 2 explores the irrelevant language effects of Han Chinese college students reading complex Chinese sentences.The experimental task is a natural reading task,all using a single factor intra subject design,with the independent variable being background language proficiency.There are five levels: quiet,Chinese,Mongolian,English,and Chinese reverse playback;The dependent variables are behavioral indicators and eye movement indicators,while the behavioral indicators are accuracy.The overall analysis indicators of eye movement include total reading time,average fixation time,fixation times,and backtracking times.The local analysis indicators of eye movement include first fixation time,gaze time,total fixation time,and backtracking path time.The results of Study 1 showed that there was no significant difference in behavioral indicators and eye movement indicators when reading simple Chinese sentences.When reading complex Chinese sentences,the Main effect of background speech proficiency was significant.Chinese and English background speech had more fixation times and back looking times,and the average fixation time,back looking path time and total fixation time were longer;However,there was no significant difference in various indicators between quiet,Mongolian,and Chinese reverse broadcasting conditions.Study 2 further manipulates background language proficiency to explore whether irrelevant language effects in reading are caused by background sound proficiency or audiovisual phonetic similarity,in order to clarify the mechanism of irrelevant language effects in reading.There are two sub experiments.Experiment 3 explores the irrelevant speech effects of Mongols college students reading simple Chinese sentences;Experiment 4 explored the irrelevant speech effect of Mongols college students reading complex Chinese sentences.The experimental design and variable control are the same as Study1.The results of study 2 show that the Main effect of the number of lookbacks under the simple sentence task is significant,and there is no significant difference in other indicators.Background speech has little impact on reading.When reading complex Chinese sentences,the average fixation time and total fixation time of Mongolian,Chinese,and English background language were longer than those of quiet and Chinese backcast conditions,and the number of backcasts was more than that of quiet and Chinese backcast conditions.However,there was no significant difference between quiet and Chinese backcast conditions;There is no significant difference in the first fixation time and gaze time among the five conditions,while the backtracking path time of Mongolian and Chinese background language is significantly longer.Draw the following conclusion:(1)Background language proficiency affects irrelevant language effects in sentence reading.When proficiency is low,there will be no irrelevant speech effects;The higher the proficiency,the greater the interference.The phonetic similarity of audiovisual materials is not a factor that affects irrelevant speech effects in sentence reading.(2)Task difficulty can also affect irrelevant language effects in reading.When the difficulty of reading tasks is low,there will be no irrelevant speech effects;When the difficulty of reading tasks is high,the interference generated by background language with higher proficiency is greater.(3)The results support the process interference hypothesis,where background language has a significant interfering effect on the later stages of semantic processing and sentence meaning integration.