What phenomenon occurs when a person is prevented from rehearsing items to be remembered by repeating an irrelevant sound?

The correct answer, articulatory suppression, refers to a cognitive phenomenon where an individual’s ability to rehearse information is disrupted by the presence of an irrelevant auditory stimulus, such as a sound or words that do not relate to the content being rehearsed. This disruption occurs because the irrelevant sound occupies the phonological loop, a component of working memory that is responsible for verbal rehearsal.

When a person attempts to remember items, such as a list of words, and is simultaneously asked to repeat an irrelevant sound, their capacity to engage in subvocalization—that is, mentally rehearsing or repeating those words to themselves—is impaired. This leads to a decrease in memory performance for the items because rehearsal is critical for transferring information from short-term to long-term memory.

In contrast, the other options do not pertain directly to this specific disruption of rehearsal. Syntactic coordination relates to the ways in which sentence structure is organized during communication, lexical priming involves the activation of certain words impacting the recognition of related words, and statistical regularities refer to learning patterns based on the frequency and predictability of certain stimuli over time. Each of these concepts addresses different aspects of cognitive psychology that do not involve the immediate impact of an irrelevant sound on memory rehearsal.