The assumption that speech shadowing commandeers all the subject's capacity was tested in two ways: by manipulating the linguistic parameters of the non-attended message, and by superimposing a task of repeating the second message whenever possible while shadowing the first message. Eight subjects shadowed prose or random words (130 words per min). Non-attended messages of either type were also presented as forward, or reversed speech. With reversed speech, percentage shadowing scores for random words were less than prose (P < 0.001). Random word shadowing was further adversely affected with non-attended, forward speech, there being a significant interaction (P < 0.001) between shadowed message type and intelligibility of the non-attended message. Subjects repeated more words shadowing both messages than one alone (P < 0.001), despite the switching which this entailed, and shadowing scores were related to the redundancy of both message combinations.
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