Long Reverberation Time Decreases Recall of Spoken Information

The aim of the study was to explore if a long reverberation time has the same effect on recall of spoken words as background noise was shown to have in a previous study. A further aim was to study the influence of working memory capacity on performance in these conditions. Thirty-two subjects performed a word recall and a sentence recognition test. They repeated each word to ensure correct identification. A reading span test measured their working memory capacity. Performance of the word recall task was impaired by the long reverberation time. The effect was most evident in the primacy part of the word list. No correlation was found between reading span score and recall performance.