Transmission delay in audio communications is a well-known obstacle to achieving smooth communication. However, it is not known what kinds of effects are caused by small delays. We hypothesized that the small delay in the listener's responses disturbs the speaker's "verbal conditioning," where the verbal behavior of the speaker varies in accordance with the listener's responses. We examined whether the small delays in the listener's responses disturb the speaker's verbal conditioning using an artificial-grammar learning task. The results suggested that a 300-ms delay disturbed the participants' verbal conditioning although they were not adequately aware of the delay.

The performance of a force feedback system is disturbed by delay that arises from the time required for transmission and processing of data. We used a psychophysical method to measure how much a user's subjective impression of elasticity associated with delays of feedback force deviated from the original physical elasticity. The results show that users' point of subjective equality (PSE) for their subjective impression of elasticity decreased as the delay of feedback force increased. We proposed a model that estimates the PSE of elasticity from the variables that can be physically measured. Another experiment was conducted to examine the model's prediction, which the results supported.