Effects of Transmission Delay on the Fine Temporal Structure of Conversation
Peter D. Bricker · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1966
Subjects worked in pairs on a task that required them to communicate over a four-wire voice circuit, 14 pairs served under each of three conditions, which differed only in the amount of pure transmission delay inserted. The efficiency of verbal encoding was adversely affected by the extreme condition (1.8-sec roundtrip delay), but subjects in the 0.6-sec-delay condition did not differ from those in the zero-delay condition, either in efficiency or in their responses to a post-experimental questionnaire. However, several measures derived from an automated analysis of the speech-activity patterns reflected systematic differences among the three conditions. The finding that the temporal patterns of conversations were modified by an amount of delay insufficient to produce changes in the other variables is relevant to any attempt to characterize conversational behavior.