ABSTRACT
We report three experiments on the comprehension of spoken instructions analogous to those issued to pilots by air traffic controllers. Participants were native and nonnative speakers of English. We varied message length, speech rate (Experiments 1 and 2), and the number of words per instruction (Experiment 3). We found a very strong effect of message length but no effect of speech rate and no effect of the number of words per instruction. We also found that native and nonnative speakers of English showed the same pattern of results suggesting that performance was governed by basic cognitive processes that may be language independent.
