Irrelevant noise in the work environment has long been viewed as a source of annoyance and disturbance with speech being rated as the worst (e.g. Nemecek and Grandjean, 1973; Kjellberg and Landstrom, 1994). This may be particularly detrimental in environments where background speech is prevalent, such as call centers. Furthermore, additional disruption may occur when the background speech is similar to items in the primary task. We report an experiment that examined the effects of speech and the role of semantic similarity using a call center-like task. Analyses showed that although both similar and dissimilar speech noise conditions were worse than a quiet noise condition, there was no difference between the two speech conditions. Results are discussed in light of the changing-state account of the irrelevant sound effect.
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