The Telephone Game (also known internationally as Chinese Whispers) is a simple game where several people forma a line and the person on the end of the line (or a judge who will not participate) comes up with a phrase and whispers it to the person next to them. The message will then be whispered from person to person until it reaches the last person in the line. Finally this message will be shard with the group. Usually, with enough people in the group, enough errors have accumulated in the passing of the message that the original message is completely distorted into something new.
Having played this game as a child, I never though that the game had inherent difficulties, I just though it was my friend Steven being a jerk and intentionally warping the sentence midway through and let misspoken or misremembered words make up the rest of the errors. When we whisper, we lose some of the information that is present when we talk in full voice: we prevent our vocal cords from vibrating when we whisper, thus making all consonants are voiceless. When one player brings his or her head to the next's ear and we lose a significant portion of the number of consonants that are normally available. Of the (roughly) twenty four common english IPA sounds, half of them exist in a voiced - voiceless pair giving us around seventy five percent of the english consonant sounds. All sudden when the first player says "pat," player two might hear "bat" which might later be misinterpreted as "bad" each time moving between the voiced-voiceless pairs of consonants.
If the game was played face to face rather than whispering into the next player's ear, players might be able to get more information from the other players lip shape. There is a significant amount of information that we obtain from the visual cues of the movement of a speaker's lips. Known as the McGurk Effect (an Aural-Optical illusion) a consonant sound (like 'aba') which is overlaid with the video of a person saying a different consonant sound (such as 'afa') can trick our brain into believing that it heard the 'afa' sound instead. From this illusion we can see that our perception of what we hear relies heavily on what we see, even though sometimes it may not seem that way. Without this visual information it is certainly hard to determine what message is being passed along.
Finally, the human brain is lazy. While an immensely powerful organ, the brain tries to make the most of approximated data. From auditory and visual cues, our brain tries to guess what we are hearing and seeing. Somehow we are able to make sense of the enormous number of errors that occur during day to day speech. Our brains are trying to come up with the most likely meaning of the jumble of sounds that stream at us every day. Therefore, when we hear something that doesn't quite make sense, our brain doesn't miss a beat, it guesses at something that would make sense, perhaps filling in information that wasn't there to get a full (yet perhaps partially incorrect) sentence from incomplete data. Or it was just Steve. Let's just blame it all on Steve.
Thanks for pointing out some of the phonetic and stimulatory constraints that our brains have to deal with when playing this game. Your final remark however, about the brain's tendency to make guesses, I believe to be the most influential constraint at play here. Even when in a state of heightened awareness, i.e.playing the game, humans have a natural tendency to summarize, making connections and guesses where the stimulus was not processed. Having played the game and missed some important aspect of the utterance, I remember making an educated guess at some point, in an attempt to keep the telephone line as close as it can be. Assuming all players in the game are maximizing agents and are paying attention to gameplay, rather than let their mind wander, you would think that humans would be able to perform this very simple task, even when under the phonetic constraints you highlighted. I would also wager that accuracy decreases as sentence length increases, since humans can only remember 7-12 tokens in their short term memory. It's fun to see how linguistics and brain behavior pop up in the most unexpected places! Thanks for your post.
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