The Effects of Time Delay
Delays of a quarter- or half-second have different effects on various kinds of communications. However, we are concerned here only with what they might do to telephone conversations. Time delay will affect conversations in two ways. One of these—pure delay—depends on the nature of speech and the way people use it to converse; the other—echo—has to do with the nature of the world’s telephone systems.
The first effect can be illustrated by an example. Suppose that George in Paris is talking to me in New York. He says, “Do you want to go?” and I answer “Yes” immediately upon hearing the word “go.” But that word didn’t arrive in New York until a quarter of a second after George said it, and my reply was delayed another quarter-second, so George hears my instantaneous reply a half-second late. Under some circumstances, he might interpret this delay to mean that I was less than enthusiastic about going. We don’t know exactly what response times people expect in conversation, or how much variation in such intervals they can tolerate. But it has been assumed that delays of a half-second or more would make a noticeable and perhaps disturbing difference. A little later on, I will describe an experiment dealing with this first effect. But first we must briefly discuss the second effect of delay on telephone conversation, to show why we decided to try to isolate the first effect and study it separately.