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Description: By using Chinese tongue twisters as visual sentences, the present research examines whether disruption due to the semantic and phonological characteristics of background speech is modulated by the nature of the focal reading task. Two randomly-assigned groups of Chinese participants read the same set of Chinese single sentences with repeated phonemes (i.e., tongue twisters) while being exposed to four background sound conditions. One group of participants were required to read each sentence for meaning and then answer a short “yes-no” question (i.e., semantic decision task). For the other group, participants were required to identify the most frequent character onset in the sentence and then choose one, from two, characters that contained that onset (i.e., phonological decision task). The results showed that semantic properties of speech only disrupted the semantic decision task, but had no significant impact on the phonological decision task. However, phonological properties of speech influenced both tasks. Furthermore, the disruption effect due to the phonological properties of speech was greater for the phonological decision task than for the semantic decision task. These findings suggest that primary task demands modulate the extent that readers experience phonological and semantic disruption due to background speech.