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Therapeutic and Diagnostic Applications of Delayed Auditory Feedback
Author(s) -
McCormick Barry
Publication year - 1975
Publication title -
international journal of language and communication disorders
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.101
H-Index - 67
eISSN - 1460-6984
pISSN - 1368-2822
DOI - 10.3109/13682827509011281
Subject(s) - psychology , audiology , fluency , auditory feedback , normality , reading (process) , subject (documents) , test (biology) , value (mathematics) , cognitive psychology , social psychology , linguistics , computer science , medicine , paleontology , philosophy , mathematics education , machine learning , library science , biology
Summary For many years the principles of Delayed Auditory Feedback (D.A.F.) have been utilised: (a) in test for investigating non‐organic hearing problems and (b) as a therapeutic aid to increase the oral fluency of stutterers. With reference to (a) above, if D.A.F. is to be of true value as a test for providing definitive information about the normality or otherwise, of a subject's auditory thresholds, then it is desirable that any subjective judgments of the effects on a person's voice, should be replaced by a quantifiable measure. It has been suggested that timing the reading of a passage may be useful for this purpose. Another approach is to measure the effects on the intensity of a subject's voice. A procedure was devised by the author to assess the value, if any, of the latter two measurements on a sample of 25 normally hearing subjects and on two cases with suspected non‐organic hearing problems. A very clear pattern emerged for all the cases tested. It was found that if a relatively long delay time of two‐thirds of a second was used, then at feedback levels in excess of 60 dB, a very marked effect could be detected on the subject's voice level, and furthermore, the voice increased progressively as the intensity of the feedback signal was increased. Although it would appear logical that this should be the case, here the magnitude of the effect was being scrutinised. The author believes that such measurements of the effects of D.A.F. on a subject's voice level might provide useful indications to the integrity of a subject's speech feedback loop. This may be of diagnostic significance when investigating the monitoring systems of stutterers and patients with various voice disorders. At delay times as long as two‐thirds of a second, the Lombard Voice Reflex, and the effects of D.A.F. will interact in a complex way, and the resulting experience may be more beneficial to stutterers than either of the more familiar methods of (1) administering D.A.F. at shorter delay times or (2) masking a stutterer's voice with an external source of noise. Brief discussion of the terminology used to describe non‐organic hearing problems; the studies of the effects of D.A.F. on stutterers; and the Lombard Voice Reflex is included.