The irrelevant speech effect refers to the degradation of serial recall when speech sounds are presented, even if the list items are presented visually. The sounds need not be a language the participant understands, nor even a real language - human speech sounds are sufficient to produce this effect.
Read more about Irrelevant Speech Effect: Interference Hypothesis
Famous quotes containing the words irrelevant, speech and/or effect:
“The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn’t discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip.”
—Leon Edel (b. 1907)
“Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man.”
—Bible: New Testament St. Paul, in Colossians, 4:6.
“We all have—to put it as nicely as I can—our lower centres and our higher centres. Our lower centres act: they act with terrible power that sometimes destroys us; but they don’t talk.... Since the war the lower centres have become vocal. And the effect is that of an earthquake. For they speak truths that have never been spoken before—truths that the makers of our domestic institutions have tried to ignore.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)