The aim of the study was to explore if a long reverberation has the same effect on recall of spoken words as background noise was shown to have in a previous study. A further aim was to study the role of working memory capacity for performance in these conditions. Thirty-two subjects performed a word recall and a sentence recog-nition test. They repeated each word to ensure correct identification. A reading span test measured their working memory capacity. Performance of the word recall task was impaired by the long reverberation time. The effect was most evident in the pri-macy part of the word list. The reading span score was unrelated to recall perform-ance.