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:
“If the Nazis have really been guilty of the unspeakable crimes circumstantially imputed to them, then—let us make no mistake—pacifism is faced with a situation with which it cannot cope. The conventional pacifist conception of a reasonable or generous peace is irrelevant to this reality.”
—John Middleton Murry (1889–1957)
“What is this conversation, now secular,
A speech not mine yet speaking for me in
The heaving jelly of my tribal air?
It rises in the throat, it climbs the tongue,
It perches there for secret tutelage....”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“Nothing could his enemies do but it rebounded to his infinite advantage,—that is, to the advantage of his cause.... No theatrical manager could have arranged things so wisely to give effect to his behavior and words. And who, think you, was the manager? Who placed the slave-woman and her child, whom he stooped to kiss for a symbol, between his prison and the gallows?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)