Research Design Connection: Overheard Conversations
People developing or using sound masking systems will be intrigued by Marsh and team’s research related to overheard conversations. The Marsh-lead group determined that “Overhearing a telephone conversation – whereby only one of the two speakers is heard – is subjectively more annoying and objectively more distracting than overhearing a full conversation. The present study sought to determine whether this “halfalogue” effect is attributable to unexpected offsets and onsets within the background speech (acoustic unexpectedness) or to the tendency to predict the unheard part of the conversation (semantic [un]predictability).” In experiments conducted “The halfalogue effect was only present for the meaningful speech condition…The halfalogue effect is thus attributable to the semantic (un)predictability, not the acoustic unexpectedness, of background telephone conversation.” John Marsh, Robert Ljung, Helena Jahncke, Douglas MacCutcheon, Florian Pausch, Linden Ball, and Francois Vachon. 2018. “Why Are Background Telephone Conversations Distracting?” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, vol. 24, no. …
Log in to Continue Reading
