Emotional prosody of task-irrelevant speech interferes with the retention of serial order.

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (8) ◽  
pp. 1303-1312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florian Kattner ◽  
Wolfgang Ellermeier
Keyword(s):  
Serial Order ◽  
Irrelevant Speech ◽  
Emotional Prosody ◽  
Task Irrelevant

scholarly journals Working-memory disruption by task-irrelevant talkers depends on degree of talker familiarity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Kreitewolf ◽  
Malte Wöstmann ◽  
Sarah Tune ◽  
Michael Plöchl ◽  
Jonas Obleser
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Serial Order ◽  
Irrelevant Speech ◽  
Speech Comprehension ◽  
Memory Retention ◽  
Statistics Course ◽  
Memory Disruption ◽  
Task Irrelevant ◽  
Talker Familiarity

AbstractWhen listening, familiarity with an attended talker’s voice improves speech comprehension. Here, we instead investigated the effect of familiarity with a distracting talker. In an irrelevant-speech task, we assessed listeners’ working memory for the serial order of spoken digits when a task-irrelevant, distracting sentence was produced by either a familiar or an unfamiliar talker (with rare omissions of the task-irrelevant sentence). We tested two groups of listeners using the same experimental procedure. The first group were undergraduate psychology students (N=66) who had attended an introductory statistics course. Critically, each student had been taught by one of two course instructors, whose voices served as familiar and unfamiliar task-irrelevant talkers. The second group of listeners were family members and friends (N=20) who had known either one of the two talkers for more than ten years. Students, but not family members and friends, made more errors when the task-irrelevant talker was familiar versus unfamiliar. Interestingly, the effect of talker familiarity was not modulated by the presence of task-irrelevant speech: students experienced stronger working-memory disruption by a familiar talker irrespective of whether they heard a task-irrelevant sentence during memory retention or merely expected it. While previous work has shown that familiarity with an attended talker benefits speech comprehension, our findings indicate that familiarity with an ignored talker deteriorates working memory for target speech. The absence of this effect in family members and friends suggests that the degree of familiarity modulates memory disruption.

scholarly journals ERP Evidence for a Sex-Specific Stroop Effect in Emotional Speech

2003 ◽  
Vol 15 (8) ◽  
pp. 1135-1148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annett Schirmer ◽  
Sonja A. Kotz
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Processing ◽  
Event Related Potentials ◽  
Behavioral Effect ◽  
Emotional Prosody ◽  
Emotional Speech ◽  
Emotional Stimuli ◽  
Emotional Information ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Related Potentials ◽  
Task Irrelevant

The present study investigated the interaction of emotional prosody and word valence during emotional comprehension in men and women. In a prosody-word interference task, participants listened to positive, neutral, and negative words that were spoken with a happy, neutral, and angry prosody. Participants were asked to rate word valence while ignoring emotional prosody, or vice versa. Congruent stimuli were responded faster and more accurately as compared to incongruent emotional stimuli. This behavioral effect was more salient for the word valence task than for the prosodic task and was comparable between men and women. The event-related potentials (ERPs) revealed a smaller N400 amplitude for congruent as compared to emotionally incongruent stimuli. This ERP effect, however, was significant only for the word valence judgment and only for female listeners. The present data suggest that the word valence judgment was more difficult and more easily influenced by task-irrelevant emotional information than the prosodic task in both men and women. Furthermore, although emotional prosody and word valence may have a similar influence on an emotional judgment in both sexes, ERPs indicate sex differences in the underlying processing. Women, but not men, show an interaction between prosody and word valence during a semantic processing stage.

scholarly journals Linguistic processing of task-irrelevant speech at a Cocktail Party

eLife ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paz Har-shai Yahav ◽  
Elana Zion Golumbic
Keyword(s):  
Neural Activity ◽  
Irrelevant Speech ◽  
Cocktail Party ◽  
Noisy Environments ◽  
Linguistic Processing ◽  
Processing Resources ◽  
Posterior Parietal ◽  
Human Participants ◽  
Task Irrelevant ◽  
And Task

Paying attention to one speaker in noisy environments can be extremely difficult, because to-be-attended and task-irrelevant speech compete for processing resources. We tested whether this competition is restricted to acoustic-phonetic interference or if it extends to competition for linguistic processing as well. Neural activity was recorded using Magnetoencephalography as human participants were instructed to attended to natural speech presented to one ear, and task-irrelevant stimuli were presented to the other. Task-irrelevant stimuli consisted either of random sequences of syllables, or syllables structured to form coherent sentences, using hierarchical frequency-tagging. We find that the phrasal structure of structured task-irrelevant stimuli was represented in the neural response in left inferior frontal and posterior parietal regions, indicating that selective attention does not fully eliminate linguistic processing of task-irrelevant speech. Additionally, neural tracking of to-be-attended speech in left inferior frontal regions was enhanced when competing with structured task-irrelevant stimuli, suggesting inherent competition between them for linguistic processing.

scholarly journals Attention effects on the processing of task-relevant and task-irrelevant speech sounds and letters

2013 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Mittag ◽  
Karina Inauri ◽  
Tatu Huovilainen ◽  
Miika Leminen ◽  
Emma Salo ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Irrelevant Speech ◽  
Speech Sounds ◽  
Task Irrelevant ◽  
And Task

scholarly journals Phonological Task Enhances the Frequency-Following Response to Deviant Task-Irrelevant Speech Sounds

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimmo Alho ◽  
Katarzyna Żarnowiec ◽  
Natàlia Gorina-Careta ◽  
Carles Escera
Keyword(s):  
Irrelevant Speech ◽  
Speech Sounds ◽  
Frequency Following Response ◽  
Task Irrelevant

Privileged Access by Irrelevant Speech to Short-term Memory: The Role of Changing State

1992 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 645-669 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dylan Jones ◽  
Clare Madden ◽  
Chris Miles
Keyword(s):  
Short Term Memory ◽  
Serial Order ◽  
Irrelevant Speech ◽  
Auditory Signal ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Phonological Representations ◽  
Term Memory ◽  
Phonological Store ◽  
Effect Experiment

Memory for visually presented items is impaired by speech that is played as an irrelevant background. The paper presents the view that changing state of the auditory material is an important prerequisite for this disruption. Four experiments studied the effects of sounds varying in complexity in an attempt to establish which features of changing state in the auditory signal lead to diminished recall. Simple unvarying or repetitive speech sounds were not sufficient to induce the irrelevant speech effect (Experiment 1): in addition, simple analogues of speech, possessing regular or irregular envelopes and using a range of carriers, failed to imitate the action of speech (Experiment 2). Variability of between-utterance phonology in the irrelevant stream (Experiment 3) emerged as a crucial factor. Moreover, predictability of the syllable sequence did not reduce the degree of disruption (Experiment 4) suggesting that supra-syllabic characteristics of the speech are of little importance. The results broadly support the idea that disruption of short-term memory only occurs when the speech stream changes in state. It is argued that disruption occurs in memory when cues to serial order based on phonological representations of heard material interfere with the phonological codes of visual origin. It is suggested that cues to changing state of the speech input contaminate those associated with items of visual origin, which are already in a phonological store.

scholarly journals The vulnerability of working memory to distraction is rhythmic

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malte Wöstmann ◽  
Troby Ka-Yan Lui ◽  
Kai-Hendrik Friese ◽  
Jens Kreitewolf ◽  
Malte Naujokat ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Acoustic Noise ◽  
Memory Performance ◽  
Onset Time ◽  
Serial Order ◽  
Irrelevant Speech ◽  
Event Related Potential ◽  
Cognitive System ◽  
Memory Retention ◽  
Recall Accuracy

AbstractRecent research posits that the cognitive system samples target stimuli in a rhythmic fashion, characterized by target detection fluctuating at frequencies of ~3–8 Hz. Besides prioritized encoding of targets, a key cognitive function is the protection of working memory from distractor intrusion. Here, we test to which degree the vulnerability of working memory to distraction is rhythmic. In an Irrelevant-Speech Task, N = 23 human participants had to retain the serial order of nine numbers in working memory while being distracted by task-irrelevant speech with variable temporal onsets. The magnitude of the distractor-evoked N1 component in the event-related potential as well as behavioural recall accuracy, both measures of memory distraction, were periodically modulated by distractor onset time in approximately 2–4 cycles per second (Hz). Critically, an underlying 2.5-Hz rhythm explained variation in both measures of distraction such that stronger phasic distractor encoding mediated lower phasic memory recall accuracy. In a behavioural follow-up experiment, we tested whether these results would replicate in a task design without rhythmic presentation of target items. Participants (N = 6 with on average >2,500 trials, each) retained two line-figures in memory while being distracted by acoustic noise of varying onset across trials. In agreement with the main experiment, the temporal onset of the distractor periodically modulated memory performance. These results suggest that during working memory retention, the human cognitive system implements distractor suppression in a temporally dynamic fashion, reflected in ~400-ms long cycles of high versus low distractibility.

Irrelevant Speech Disrupts Item-Context Binding

2013 ◽  
Vol 60 (5) ◽  
pp. 376-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raoul Bell ◽  
Jan P. Röer ◽  
Axel Buchner
Keyword(s):  
Serial Position ◽  
Serial Order ◽  
Irrelevant Speech ◽  
Item Memory ◽  
Order Information ◽  
Background Color ◽  
Immediate Memory ◽  
Irrelevant Sound ◽  
General Explanation ◽  
Auditory Distractors

The present study examines the effects of irrelevant speech on immediate memory. Previous research led to the suggestion that auditory distractors particularly impair memory for serial order. These findings were explained by assuming that irrelevant speech disrupts the formation and maintenance of links between adjacent items in a to-be-remembered sequence, resulting in a loss of order information. Here we propose a more general explanation of these findings by claiming that the capacity to form and maintain item-context bindings is generally impaired by the presence of auditory distractors. The results of Experiment 1 show that memory for the association between an item and its background color is drastically impaired by irrelevant speech, just as memory for the association between an item and its serial position. In Experiment 2 it was examined whether the disrupting effects of irrelevant sound are limited to memory for item-context associations or whether item memory is also affected by the auditory distractors. The results revealed that irrelevant speech disrupts both item memory and item-context binding. The results suggest that the effects of irrelevant sound on immediate memory are more general than previously assumed, which has important theoretical and applied implications.

scholarly journals Linguistic processing of task-irrelevant speech at a Cocktail Party

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paz Har-shai Yahav ◽  
Elana Zion Golumbic
Keyword(s):  
Selective Attention ◽  
Neural Activity ◽  
Neural Response ◽  
Irrelevant Speech ◽  
Syntactic Analysis ◽  
Noisy Environments ◽  
Linguistic Processing ◽  
Processing Resources ◽  
Task Irrelevant ◽  
Over Time

AbstractPaying attention to one speaker in noisy environments can be extremely difficult. This is because task-irrelevant speech competes for processing resources with attended speech. However, whether this competition is restricted to acoustic-phonetic interference, or if it extends to competition for linguistic processing as well, remains highly debated. To address this debate, here we test whether task-irrelevant speech sounds are integrated over time to form hierarchical representations of lexical and syntactic structures.Neural activity was recorded using Magnetoencephalography (MEG) during a dichotic listening task, where human participants attended to natural speech presented to one ear, and task-irrelevant stimuli were presented to the other. Task-irrelevant stimuli consisted either of random sequences of syllables (Non-Structured), or syllables ordered to form coherent sentences (Structured). Using hierarchical frequency-tagging, the neural signature of different linguistic-hierarchies within the Structured stimuli – namely words, phrases and sentences – can be uniquely discerned from the neural response.We find that, indeed, the phrasal structure of task-irrelevant stimuli was represented in the neural response, primarily in left inferior frontal and posterior parietal regions. Moreover, neural tracking of attended speech in left inferior frontal regions was enhanced when task-irrelevant stimuli were linguistically structured. This pattern suggests that syntactic structurebuilding processes are applied to task-irrelevant speech, at least under these circumstances, and that selective attention does not fully eliminate linguistic processing of task-irrelevant speech. Rather, the inherent competition for linguistic processing resources between the two streams likely results in the increased listening effort experienced when trying to focus selective attention in multi-speaker contexts.Significance statementThis study addresses the fundamental question of how the brain deals with competing speech in noisy environments. Specifically, we ask: when one attempts to focus their attention on a particular speaker, what level of linguistic processing is applied to other, task-irrelevant speech? By measuring neural activity, we find evidence that the phrasal structure of task-irrelevant speech is indeed discerned, indicating that linguistic information is integrated over time and undergoes some syntactic analysis. Moreover, neural responses to attended speech were also enhanced in speech-processing regions, when presented together with comprehensible yet task-irrelevant speech. These results nicely demonstrate the inherent competition for linguistic processing resources among concurrent speech, providing evidence that selective attention does not fully eliminate linguistic processing of task-irrelevant speech.

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