Yes — and this is one of the most important findings from ISE research for office design. The ISE is driven by phonological (sound-pattern) similarity to language, not by semantic comprehension. Even speech in a language you do not speak, played at a level where you can hear it but not parse its meaning, still activates the phonological loop in working memory and degrades performance on verbal tasks. The implication: the solution to the ISE is acoustic enclosure (reducing speech to below intelligibility threshold), not familiarity-based adaptation.