The process of auditory distraction: disrupted attention and impaired recall in a simulated lecture environment.

Literature on auditory distraction has generally focused on the effects of particular kinds of sounds on attention to target stimuli. In support of extensive previous findings that have demonstrated the special role of language as an auditory distractor, we found that a concurrent speech stream impaired recall of a short lecture, especially for verbatim language. But impaired recall effects were also found with a variety of nonlinguistic noises, suggesting that neither type of noise nor amplitude and duration of noise are adequate predictors of distraction.