Understandable background speech can affect our ability to read and process information, research from 菠萝视频 has found.
Researchers used eye-tracking technology to test how different types of background sounds may cause distraction and lead to inefficient reading.
The paper, published by the American Psychological Association, found that readers are distracted by background speech when they can understand its meaning.
Martin Vasilev鈥淭his is a common problem in everyday life, for example for people who work in open-plan offices where there is background chatter, or in school聽classrooms,鈥� said Post-Doctoral Researcher Martin Vasilev, who led the research.
鈥淭his type of distraction appears to be quite automatic, in the sense that people inadvertently try to listen to the irrelevant speech and process its meaning, even though it has nothing to do with what they are reading. 聽
鈥淧eople also seem to 鈥榣ose track鈥� of what they were reading and have to go back and re-read previous parts of the text to compensate for the distraction.鈥�
Participants read either single sentences or short paragraphs with four background sound conditions 鈥� silence, white noise, Mandarin speech which was unintelligible to participants, or English speech.
Eye-tracking technology was used to record the eyes with a camera while participants read in real time.
It found that irrelevant speech is distracting when people can process the meaning, and led to more re-reading of words and loss of comprehension.聽
The findings suggest that the distraction is mostly semantic in nature, rather than related to the background noise itself.
鈥淭he results show that hearing meaningful speech in the background always comes at the cost of less efficient reading,鈥� said Martin. 聽
鈥淪o, even if background conversations are not distracting enough to cause comprehension problems, readers still need to spend more time reading the text聽due to the need to revisit聽previous words and sentences聽to compensate for the loss of meaning.
He added: 鈥淭hese results have implications for many real-world settings where聽background speech is common.
"For example, many聽open-plan offices聽are聽characterised by poor acoustic privacy due to the presence of telephone conversations or colleagues talking in the background.
鈥淪imilarly, background speech can also be present in educational settings, such as classrooms where there is聽background chatter or noise from nearby rooms.
"In such settings, any tasks that rely on reading聽are likely to be affected due to the less efficient processing of text聽meaning.鈥�
As the distraction by background speech is automatic, with the readers inadvertently processing the meaning of the speech even though it is not relevant to what they are reading, there is little readers can do to combat it.
鈥淚t is currently not known if there are any steps that individual readers can take to minimise the amount of the distraction,鈥� Martin said. 聽
鈥淎t present, the best strategy seems to be to try to limit the presence of background speech聽in areas where people are reading.鈥濃��
