Ever wonder why overhearing a mobile phone conversation is so annoying? Do you feel that the mobile conversations you make tend to irritate you at some point of time? It’s not just you many other people feel the same way.

According to the scientists at Cornell University, whether it is the office, on board or in a car, only half of the conversation is overheard which drains more attention and concentration than when overhearing two people talking.

The results of a study published in Psychological Science journal this month suggests people get more distracted by overhearing others talking on a phone than by regular conversations.

According to Lauren Emberson, a co-author of the study, people have less control to move away the attention from half a conversation – or halfalogue – than when listening to a dialogue.

Halfalogue the term is given by the researcher to the half of a dialogue that people hear when someone else is having a conversation on a phone nearby.

The researcher conducted two experiments to judge the impact of phone conversations on people’s attention.

For the first experiment, 24 college students were asked to perform computer tasks that required their full concentration. The researchers then played a mixture of recordings including people having a conversation and one person having a halfalogue on a phone, and measured the impact of each.

They found that the halfalogue, but not the other recordings, led to major interruption.

For the second experiment, the researchers repeated the test but filtered the recordings so that the actual words were unrecognizable. They found that the voice seemed to be coming under the water.

The researchers wanted to know whether it is the sound or the content that annoys. And the result was the content.

The behavioral arrears resulting from overheard halfalogue in Experiment 1 were directly related to the relative randomness of information in halfalogue speech, and not the differences in sounds.

Overhearing the half of a phone conversation is distracting because the brain finds it hard to predict what words will come next.

According to researchers, because overhearing a cell-phone conversation entails access to only half of a dialogue, the speech content is less predictable than that of a full conversation.