Lost in transmittance

Abstract

Previous research has shown that audio communication is particularly difficult for non-native speakers (NNS) during multilingual collaborations. Especially when audio signals become distorted, NNS are overburdened by not only having to communicate with imperfect language skills, but also compensating for the deteriorations. Under these faulty audio conditions, NNS need to pay extra time and effort to understand the conversation. In order to give NNS more time to process conversations, we tested the insertion of silent gaps (from 0.2 to 0.4 seconds) between conversational turns. First, gaps were inserted into a previously taped conversation, resulting in a significant improvement of NNS's understanding of the conversation. Second, gaps were inserted during a real-time audio conference by adding artificial delay between native speakers. The results show that the added delays have a combination of beneficial and detrimental effects for both native and non-native speakers. The findings have implications towards how audio conferencing can be improved for NNS.

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