Delayed auditory feedback during smoking cessation

Delays between speech production and hearing, delayed auditory feedback (DAF), reduce speech and reading rates. Smoking cessation in heavy smokers causes subjective reports of difficulty in concentration, decrements in cognitive performance, and EEG changes. The purpose of the present study was to determine if tobacco cessation disrupts linguistic processing as modeled by the DAF paradigm. Smokers (n = 14) were tested on 3 d of ad libitum smoking and 3 d no smoking. At each session, they read a word list (24 words) and a story (about 57 words) with and without delay (220 msec). The delay significantly decreased reading speed of the story from 3.4 to 2.9 words per second (wps) and of list from 2.1 to 1.7 wps. However, tobacco cessation had no significant effect on reading speed and no interaction with DAF. Although tobacco withdrawal slows performance on cognitive tasks, linguistic processing modeled by DAF is preserved. DAF may prove useful for the study of other drug classes and drug withdrawal states.