无关言语对阅读的干扰基于内容还是过程?——来自眼动研究的证据

Is it the Process or Content that Determines the Irrelevant Speech Effect on Chinese Sentence Reading? An Eye-Tracking Study

采用眼动追踪技术,考察无关言语对句子材料相同的自然阅读和校对阅读的影响,探讨无关言语对阅读的干扰机制是基于内容还是基于过程。结果发现,有意义言语显著干扰了正常的阅读行为,而无意义言语与无背景音条件不存在显著差异。并且背景言语类型与任务类型的交互作用显著,表现为言语的语义成分只干扰了自然阅读,而对校对阅读没有影响。实验结果支持过程干扰假说。

The irrelevant speech effect refers to the impairment of visual-information processing by background speech. Unlike the general noise, the studies the on irrelevant speech effect mainly investigate the properties of speech on cognitive tasks. Most previous studies on the irrelevant speech effect had focused on the short-term memory for visually-presented word lists. They favored the view that the irrelevant speech effect is determined by the same process rather than the confusion between the contents of the vocal and visual information. More concretely, the interference-by-process account considers the disruption as a result of the conflict between the deliberate processing in a focal task and the automatic processing of speech. However, little is known about the mechanism underlying the irrelevant speech effect in complex cognitive tasks. The present study extended this work by using measures of eye movements to examine whether the interference-by-process account also applies to the reading comprehension of Chinese sentences. Eye tracking provides a means for objectively recording and analyzing the reading behavior in a normal environment, and its varied eye movement measures also permit examining subtle changes that occur during reading with background speech. 36 participants read sentences normally while being exposed to different types of background sounds. A 3 （background speech type： meaningful speech, meaningless speech, silence）x2 （task instruction： normal reading, proofreading） mixed design was used. The background speech type was the within-subjects factor, and the task instruction was the between-subjects factor. The processing in a proofreading task is different from that in normal reading. During proofreading, in addition to understanding the meaning of the sentences, the readers should pay more attention to the word-level information. The basic hypothesis was that if the irrelevant speech effect was due to the confusion of content, then we would expect that the interference occurred regardless of the task instructions as the similarity of the content between speech and sentence materials was identical in the two types of reading tasks. Instead, if the interference was determined by the same process, we would predict an interaction between the background type and the task instruction. The accuracy rates of reading comprehension were not significantly different in all treatments. The linear-mixed effects models were used to analyze the eye movement data. The findings showed that： （1） Being consistent with many previous studies, the irrelevant speech effect on Chinese sentence reading was observed. The meaningful background speech reduced the reading rate, and leading the participants to make more fixations and regressions. While the meaningless speech had little influence on reading comprehension, which suggested that the semantic content of speech plays a more important role in the irrelevant speech effect on reading. （2） Furthermore, there was a significant interaction between the background type and the task instruction for the reading rate and the average fixation count per character. Specifically, the meaningful speech disrupted normal reading, but did not affect proofreading significantly. As the similarity between the contents of vocal and visual materials was identical, this interaction implied that it is the same process rather than the similar content that determines the interruption. The present study supports the interference-by-process account. Some implications about the irrelevant speech effect on complex cognitive tasks were also discussed..