The Effect Of Background Speech In English On Chinese And English Reading

The irrelevant speech effect(ISE)refers to the impairment of visual-information processing by irrelevant background speech.Theories of auditory distraction are controversial.They are phonological-interference hypothesis and semantic-interference hypothesis.Most of the existing studies have explored the irrelevant speech effect in the context of the mother tongue,and most of the studies support the semantic interference hypothesis.English is our second language,and it is unclear whether background speech in English has an impact on reading.The present study investigated whether there were irrelevant speech effect in Chinese and English reading under English background sounds by employing Eye Link 1000 eye-tracker.Two experiments were designed to study this issue.Experiment 1 was conducted to explore the influence of English background speech on Chinese reading,and whether the phonology or semanticity of speech played a role in the interference.Participants either read Chinese sentences while being exposed English meaningful speech(from English textbook of junior high school),English meaningless speech(scramble the nonwords of the same English passage),white noise or silence.The results were as follows: English meaningful speech,English meaningless speech and white noise improved reading rate,which readers made less reading time,fixation counts and gaze duration.These findings didn’t support either phonologicalinterference hypothesis or semantic-interference hypothesis.Experiment 2 was carried out to further investigate whether English background speech had impact on English reading.A 4-level(background speech type: English meaningful speech,English meaningless speech,white noise or silence)within-subjects design was used.We observed the irrelevant speech effect in English sentence reading.While only the English meaningful speech disrupted the effective reading rate significantly,causing more reding times,fixation counts and total fixation times.English background speech disrupted English sentence reading,meaningful,but not meaningless,irrelevant speech disrupted English sentence reading.English meaningful speech may interfere with the late word processing.The present study suggested the phonological and semantic properties of English background sounds didn’t disrupt Chinese reading.English background speech only interfered with English sentence reading,and the semantic properties of speech were the key to interference,which supported the semantic-interference hypothesis to a certain extent.