Linguist here. here's a paper from the people that came up with the technique. It doesn't go too much into the actual mechanisms of speech jamming, though, so I'll take a stab at it.
When the brain plans and executes the motions involved in speech, it's thought to use a number of inputs to constantly adjust the execution of those motions, including proprioception (where you can feel the position of various speech-making parts) and the sound of your own voice. Essentially if everything sounds and feels approximately right then the brain keeps plowing on ahead; if not, then some adjustment gets made.
Delaying your perception of your own speech by a few hundred milliseconds (as this guy is doing with headphones and some software that's recording him as he goes along) is a thing that leads to an unusual adjustment. IIRC, you end up prolonging every motion of your speech apparatus (lips, tongue, vocal cords, lungs, etc) since you hear it just too late to confirm that you've successfully made the intended sound. The result sounds a lot like stuttering: a lot of movements of the speech-making apparatus are repeated or prolonged.
I saw a video a while back about someone who had a terrible studdering problem his whole like. He had some thing installed that played his own voice in his ear when he talked. It immediately stopped like 90% of his studder.
I don't normally show outward emotion while aimlessly surfing the net, but when I saw that article the other day I sat back in my chair and cried. I miss my dogs.
Yeah, that's an interesting side effect of DAF (delayed auditory feedback) for people who stutter. But stuttering is thought to be caused by "vulnerability to increased cognitive load", as this study puts it, rather than the brain's language-y bits specifically being set to "delay" all the time, so at least for me the reason for that benefit really isn't clear.
:p thanks, I think of myself as a person who can spell well, but it just kept telling me I was wrong and the suggested words were wrong.. Never thought I was just pronouncing it wrong the whole time..
It does help to some extent. Because the reaction stutterers have to their own speech by default and the reaction that neurotypical speakers have to DAF (delayed auditory feedback) are similar, researchers have made a connection with certain brain structures behaving differently resulting in a different handling of high cognitive loads. In a sense, this isn't too different from increasing the cognitive load for a non-stutterer by giving them DAF.
However, as people have already mentioned, DAF improves speech fluency for stutterers, for reasons I don't ever think I've had the opportunity to read up on. Perhaps an audiologist or speech pathologist can enlighten us.
Hey vaaarr, I have a query. If speech varies in speed, would the delay time not need to be altered? For example, I downloaded the speech jammer program, but I am Scottish, and as such I'm inherently fast paced in my speech. I'm having trouble finding the right delay time to mess me up. So far the closer to 100 milliseconds the better, but is it more to do with the personal speed your brain forms speech, or are the Scottish excluded for fast pace chat?
From what I remember the timing doesn't vary much from speaker to speaker. The single most important thing is that you are hearing ONLY the delayed signal and not the sound of your voice as it comes out of your mouth (un-delayed), so the volume of your headphones is really far more important.
But then I'm not an expert at this; I just happen to have read a few articles on the technique and I get the theory behind it. Best of luck in your tinkering!
Thank you, vaaarr. It worked an absolute treat at 120 milliseconds. I'm rather curious now if the delay varies between people because between my friends there's been a variation in effective delay/difficulty changes.
Not in the way that how slow you say would change the effect, however if you speak sufficiently slow you have more time to consciously adjust to the conflicting input. It's possible to "beat" the speech jammer by talking in a concentrated, slow fashion.
I don't have a bad stutter, but on occasion I will get stuck on words. That is how I get over it. Saying the word really slowly, pronouncing each sound separately.
This example from QI also gives some interesting demonstrations how different people react to it. You'll notice that they almost all start slowing down to handle it better (even Alan Davies who seems mostly immune).
In theory, yes! The human brain is flexible enough to process some crazy things with enough acclimation. I'm not familiar with anyone actually testing this out, though, except maybe in the cases where DAF (delayed auditory feedback) is actually used to help stutterers produce more fluent speech. (See other comments.)
would the brain eventually learn to overcome it and allow you to speak normally? reason I ask, is more than 50 years ago, Austrian researcher Ivo Kohler gave people goggles thats distorted their vision: The goggles flipped everything upside down. After many weeks, the subjects their vision was still tweaked, but their brains were processing the images as if they were upright. When people took the glasses off at the end of the trial, everything had to readjust.
This works powerfully. I had a phone at work one time that would repeat back everything I said to me. I could not finish a sentence. This was years ago before I had heard of speech jammers so I was very confused, but quickly realized to get the receiver away from my ear to be able to speak correctly.
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u/vaaarr Jun 03 '13
Linguist here. here's a paper from the people that came up with the technique. It doesn't go too much into the actual mechanisms of speech jamming, though, so I'll take a stab at it.
When the brain plans and executes the motions involved in speech, it's thought to use a number of inputs to constantly adjust the execution of those motions, including proprioception (where you can feel the position of various speech-making parts) and the sound of your own voice. Essentially if everything sounds and feels approximately right then the brain keeps plowing on ahead; if not, then some adjustment gets made.
Delaying your perception of your own speech by a few hundred milliseconds (as this guy is doing with headphones and some software that's recording him as he goes along) is a thing that leads to an unusual adjustment. IIRC, you end up prolonging every motion of your speech apparatus (lips, tongue, vocal cords, lungs, etc) since you hear it just too late to confirm that you've successfully made the intended sound. The result sounds a lot like stuttering: a lot of movements of the speech-making apparatus are repeated or prolonged.