In this study, 100 college students were recruited to explore the effects of presentation style on the retention of vocabulary with different difficulty levels, and then to compare the differences of the retention of vocabulary with different types of background sounds played through earphones. The results showed that presentation style had a significant effect on vocabulary memory, and background sound presented by earphone decreased the final vocabulary memory performance. Among them, the impact on high-difficulty learning is very significant. The impact on low-difficulty learning is not significant. In addition, the background sound types of earphones interact with the learning difficulty. In the low-difficulty learning activities, there is a significant edge between songs with words and music without words, wordless music has a greater impact on learning. The results showed that background sounds had a near-ear effect on the automatic preemption of attention resources, and there was a nature effect in the near-ear effect, which produced a significant preemption effect on high-difficulty learning activities.