Talk:Speech disfluency

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I'm not sure where the line between speech disfluencies such as "uh" and "er" lie and something more, err, "pathological" like stuttering or stammering lies... could someone more in the know maybe flesh that out? This term seems to encompass an entire range of acoustic phenomena and my brief survey of the technical literature available via Google doesn't seem to distinguish between these two uses of term that I see. Are they the same? Different? Different aspects of the same category? Uh? Eh? Ack! --Fastfission 21:07, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Uh, let's see about that, eh? I just *typed* the words "uh" and "eh"; that means they're not too "accidental" like stammering or anything; otherwise I would have corrected them, right?
If you're wondering why people do something, do it yourself and see why :-) --Ihope127 19:47, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
Sorry. "Uh" and "huh" are themselves words which likely came into our language because of the fact that they're easy to say: the only consonant is the letter h. It's the human version of a cat's meow. Indeed we even have phrases built out of these "words", such as "Uh-huh" and "Eh? Oh, heh". Even lazier versions eliminate all vowels, replacing them with "m": "Mm-hmm" and "Hmm? Mm, hm". --Ihope127 20:48, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
it doesn't work like that. study skills owns this article and all of wikipedia --clinton denton fentonbenton

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[edit] Japanese

I heard once that something along the lines of ano is also used in Japanese. Any verification on that? --IvanP 15:54, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

Don't take my word for it, but I think that it is either an equivalent to "um", or it is intended to informally grab people's attention. So perhaps this counts. --134.48.103.32 18:40, 07 March 2006 (UTC)

I've always heard "ano" used, not the one mentioned in the article. -- LGagnon 02:35, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Our Japanese teacher once explained that ee-to (with e pronounced as e in egg) is approx. equivalent to "um let me see..." while anou just meant "hmm or um". 130.194.13.104 12:04, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Consistency of disfluency across language

I added some information about how disfluency's distribution is constant across languages: see Eklund & Shriberg (1998). Kylebgorman 02:50, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] IPA Representations

I don't think that the difference between "er" and "errr" is really clear enough - an IPA representation of each disfluency feature would be useful. I'm not sure if this is relevant either - but in my Language course we've been taught the terms "non-fluency features" and "filled pauses" for the same speech phenomenon. Should those be noted also? Seegoon 17:40, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

IPA representations from the original authors would definitely be useful, especially considering the number of ways things like eh/ay can be pronounced and spelt - it's not good enough to assume that eh is something like /æi:/ (the main article on the subject mentions /əh/) --Dom 06:35, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Like

While "like" can be a disfluency term, I think it's mostly only really usable in certain grammatical contexts. The example "I, like, don't know" sounds really fake to me (and I'm a young suburban Southern Californian — "like" is definitely something I'm accustomed to). I'm not sure what the specific "permissible" contexts are, but I think it's worth noting. -Branddobbe 03:46, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

"Like" has certainly been a part of English-language speech in this context for much longer than since the 1980s as the article describes. I can't confirm this, but it seems to me that it may be as old as jazz, the oldest existing popular music style with which I associate this particular usage. B7T 13:26, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Like vs. Uh

I changed the statement about "like" being used as "uh" and "um" to clarify. "like" in that context is technically a "discourse marker" (according to the LDC and Penn Treebank-3, 1993). These differ from filled pauses ("uh" and "um"). Kylebgorman 02:50, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Hebrew

Don't people use "Em..." in Hebrew? Shouldn't that be in the article, instead of lumping it together with Spanish?--Mo-Al 01:40, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] You know

I've found that "you know" is becoming a common speech disfluency. You know? jcloudm 20 Aug 2006

see Discourse marker. dr.ef.tymac 15:22, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] mandarin chinese

mandarin speakers do NOT use "er" as their main "filler word". who comes up with this stuff? i tried to put in an entry last week, but someone deemed it unfitting.

you should put back in the stuff about 那个 (nige or naige) as a filler phrase in Mandarin, I'm learning Chinese, and I came here looking for info about that. 136.165.46.93 17:47, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Language Dependence

I removed this section. While it did try to cite a source, it wasn't clear whether the Times article was speaking scientifically, giving 'folksy wisdom', or being humorous, and it didn't cite any sources to help us determine which. --Aquillion 18:51, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

I'm going to re-add it, as well as add another citation. Although the article was a bit vague in its substantiation, the general point of this section is non-controversial. Speech disfluences do indeed vary depending on native language. dr.ef.tymac 19:02, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] W

Great to see "W" get in there! He almost needs his own category :) Ddddan 23:24, 12 July 2007 (UTC)