The present study was an attempt to empirically find out if the very presence of background noise would impair L2 listening comprehension, and also to explore to what extent the nature of noise would mediate this disruption. Regarding the latter point, the effect of lexicality, meaning, and Ll/L2 dichotomy were investigated. The participants listened, within a repeated-measures design, to ten L2 passages two of which were against a quiet background and others were in the presence of either radio static (roughly representing the white noise, i.e., the standard non-lexical noise), Russian (as a totally unknown language) noise, English (L2) noise, or Persian (Li) noise. Matched t-test results showed the background noise to be substantially disruptive of L2 listening comprehension. In addition, more masking was found from white noise that from competing speech, including the lexicality reduced the amount of masking. The effect of meaning, too, did not reach significance: Meaningless background interfered with L2 listening comprehension as much as did meaningful speech. Similarly, Li and L2 noises were statistically equal in their power to corrupt L2 listening performance.
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