Hold that thought: are spearcons less disruptive than spoken reminders?

Speech reminders can severely disrupt list recall. Spearcons, time-compressed speech messages, might be less disruptive because they are much shorter. In this study, we asked 24 younger participants to recall 64 short lists of digit, animal, food, or furniture names. List items were presented one at a time; the number of items presented depended on individual digit spans. Spearcons affected list recall to the same extent as speech. However, people with higher digit spans had significantly worse recall. This could be due to short-term memory overload or the longer presentation time of long lists. We discuss implications for menu design.