studied the effects of irrelevant meaningful and meaningless speech in a task, in which subjects were asked questions about single sentences. They concluded that reading comprehension is disrupted by irrelevant background stimuli only when the distracting stimuli call upon the same processing mechanisms and representations (i.e., semantic processing) than the primary task. The study showed that when meaningful material (prose or random words) was presented in the background during reading, comprehension scores were poorer than with non-meaningful background stimuli. assessed the end result of the comprehension process by asking questions about the text contents after reading. A significant portion of the slow-down was due to rereading fixations made during the first-pass reading of sentences and also due to later look-back fixations launched to the target sentences from subsequent text sentences.Īlthough studies on the effects of background speech on the online reading process are largely lacking, there is rather extensive literature on disruption effects by background speech on language comprehension, measured after reading for effects on proofreading, see. They found overall slow-down in reading short text passages when it was performed in the presence of background speech (a radio talk show). To our knowledge, the study of Cauchard et al is the only one investigating disruption effects on the online reading process. Thus, the method provides a real-time protocol of the comprehension process as it evolves through time and space. There is now ample evidence that eye-tracking is a sensitive and reliable measure to study different aspects of on-line language processing, from word recognition through syntactic parsing to discourse processing. Online processing was measured by registering readers’ eye movements while they read texts at their own pace. The present study was designed to examine possible disruption effects by background speech on online text processing. Many people prefer to read in silence and find noisy environments distracting and disturbing for reading. It may also be done in a noisy environment, such as a crowded cafeteria or a busy train or subway couch, where a lively discussion or a phone conversation may be heard in the background. It may be done during a quiet evening lying on a couch undisturbed by any external sources of visual or auditory information.

Reading is done in many different physical environments. The pattern of results is best explained by a semantic account that stresses the importance of similarity in semantic processing, but not similarity in semantic content, between the reading task and background speech. Experiment 4 demonstrated that both semantically and syntactically anomalous speech produced no more disruption in reading than semantically anomalous but syntactically correct background speech. Experiment 3 showed that scrambled speech exacerbated the syntactic complexity effect more than coherent background speech, which also interfered with reading. Scrambled speech that was constructed from the text to-be read did not disrupt reading more than scrambled speech constructed from a different, semantically unrelated text. Experiment 2 demonstrated robust disruption in reading as a result of semantically and syntactically anomalous scrambled background speech preserving normal sentence-like intonation. In Experiment 1, foreign-language background speech did not disrupt sentence processing. Effects of background speech were primarily seen in rereading time. Readers’ eye movement patterns were used to study online sentence comprehension.

Effects of background speech on reading were examined by playing aloud different types of background speech, while participants read long, syntactically complex and less complex sentences embedded in text.

Reading speech timer