Principle Investigators: apl. Prof. Dr. Maria Klatte; Prof. Dr. Thomas Lachmann

Source of funding: German Research Foundation (DFG)

Grant amount RPTU: 155.000 €

Funding Period: 32 months

Project Period: 2019 – 2022

Immediate serial recall of visually presented verbal items is reliably impaired by task-irrelevant background speech that participants are instructed to ignore. In different models of working memory, this „Irrelevant Speech Effect“ (ISE) has been attributed to interference with phonological representations in a phonological short-term store, interference with a domain-general serial rehearsal process, and attention capture. In the current project, we investigate the role of phonological processing and serial rehearsal in the ISE. For this aim, we (i) limit the usage of rehearsal in a serial recall task through rapid visual presentation of the items, (ii) we assess the effects of irrelevant speech on phonological processing tasks that do not involve seriation, and (iii), we investigate the role of phonological complexity of the irrelevant speech tokens in ISE evocation. Furthermore, we investigate the potential of EEG-parameters of speech sound discrimination as predictors of ISE magnitude.