Effects of aircraft noise and speech on prose memory: What role for working memory capacity?

Previous research indicates that aircraft noise and meaningful background speech are particularly detrimental to school adolescents' ability to remember what they read, but until now the effects from aircraft noise and speech have never been compared directly in an experiment. Furthermore, individual differences in susceptibility to these effects are not well understood. The present investigation addressed these two issues. Adolescents attending upper secondary school were recruited as participants and the data collection was made in their ordinary classrooms. The results from two experiments revealed that speech is more detrimental to prose memory than is aircraft noise, and individual differences in working memory capacity contributes more to individual differences in susceptibility to the effects of aircraft noise on prose memory than to the effects of speech. Some applied implications of those findings to noise abatement interventions are suggested.