Zoom was how I enjoyed trivia nights, happy hours and live performances.
As a researcher whostudies psychology and linguistics, I decided to examine the impact of video-conferencing on conversation.
Together with three undergraduate students, I rantwo experiments.
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These experiments suggest that the natural rhythm of conversation is disrupted by videoconferencing apps like Zoom.
Cognitive anatomy of a conversation
I already had some expertise in studying conversation.
The average pause between speakers in two-party conversations is about one-fifth of a second.
All of this multitasking ought to make conversation quite laborious, but it is not.
Getting in sync
Brainwaves are the rhythmic firing, or oscillation, of neurons in your brain.
This acoustic spectrogram of the utterance Do you think surfers are scared of being bitten by a shark?
has an overlaid oscillatory function (blue wave).
The hash marks were generated with a Praat script written by deJong and Wempe.
Julie Boland, CC BY-ND
There is also evidence thatoscillators can accommodate some variabilityin syllable rate.
This makes the notion that an automatic neural oscillator could track the fuzzy rhythms of speech plausible.
Longer syllables are not a problem if their duration is a multiple of the duration for short syllables.
In a video call, the audio and video signals are split into packets that zip across the internet.
Our experimentsdemonstrated that the natural rhythm of turn transitions between speakers is disrupted by Zoom.
Our evidence supporting this explanation is indirect.
We did not measure cortical oscillations, nor did we manipulate the electronic transmission delays.
Research into the connection between neural oscillatory timing mechanisms and speech in generalis promisingbut not definitive.
Researchers in the field need to pin down an oscillatory mechanism for naturally occurring speech.
Could it tolerate relatively long lags of 100 milliseconds if the transmission lag were constant instead of variable?
