Abstract
Two studies were conducted with the aim of explaining the disruptive effect of irrelevant auditory stimuli(speech sound/ office noise) on an oral reading text recall task (experiment 1) and an oral reading text recall task with proofreading (experiment 2). In experiment 1, the amount of disruption caused by speech sound was significantly larger than that caused by office noise. In experiment 2, only the office noise disrupted the recall performance. The results revealed two points. First, oral reading text recall is disrupted by both speech sound and office noise; however, the amount of disruption by the speech sound is significantly larger. Second, the disruptive effect of speech sound shares a cognitive process with phonological proofreading. These results were interpreted in terms of Cowan's attention and memory frame (1995).
