DOES ARTICULATORY SUPPRESSION REMOVE THE IRRELEVANT SPEECH EFFECT

Salame and Baddeley (1982) reported that the effect of irrelevant spee ch on the serial recall of visually presented sequences was abolished when subjects performed articulatory suppression during presentation a nd recall of the target items. They argued that this is because suppre ssion isolates visually presented material from the phonological store , which they consider to be the locus of the irrelevant speech effect. In the present experiment, an alternative interpretation of Salame an d Baddeley's findings was investigated. Salame and Baddeley used nine- item sequences, and observed very low levels of recall when articulati on was suppressed. It is therefore possible that Salame and Baddeley's failure to observe any additional effect of irrelevant speech reflect s either a floor effect or else a strategic choice by subjects to aban don the use of a phonological memory code because of task difficulty. In the experiment reported here, this issue was investigated by using both six- and nine-item sequences. Results revealed no effect of irrel evant speech under articulatory suppression even at the shorter sequen ce length. The results therefore replicate and extend the findings of Salame and Baddeley (1982), and provide support for their view that vi sually presented material must be articulated before it becomes suscep tible to interference from irrelevant speech.