Speech disfluencies are any breaks in otherwise fluent speech: for example, words/sentences/phrases that are cut off, restarts/repetitions/repairs ("The best part of my job is...well...the best part of my job is the responsibility."), and fillers.

Fillers are parts of speech which are not generally recognized as purposeful or containing formal meaning, usually expressed as pauses such as uh or er, but also extending to repairs ("He was wearing bla—uh, blue pants"), and articulation problems such as stuttering. Use is normally looked down upon in mass media such as news reports or films, but they occur regularly in everyday conversation, sometimes representing upwards of 20% of "words" in conversation. Stuttering, also known as stammering in the United Kingdom, is a speech disorder in which the flow of speech is disrupted by involuntary repetitions and prolongations of sounds, syllables, words or phrases; and involuntary silent pauses or blocks in which the stutterer is unable to produce sounds. ... Mass media is a term used to denote, as a class, that section of the media specifically conceived and designed to reach a very large audience (typically at least as large as the whole population of a nation state). ... News is any new information or current events. ... Film is a term that encompasses motion pictures as individual projects, as well as the field in general. ...

Americans use pauses such as "um" or "uh," the British say "er" or "erm", Mandarin speakers use something like "er," the French use something like "euh," the German say "äh" (pronounced eh or er), Japanese use "ahh", "ano", or "eto", and Hebrew and Spanish speakers use something like "ehhh", and "este" in Mexican Spanish. Other languages have their own syllables for these pauses, but research has shown that the relative usage of these disfluencies is approximately constant across language boundaries. Hebrew redirects here. ...

Recent linguistic research has suggested that non-pathological disfluencies may contain a variety of meaning; the frequency of "uh" and "um" in English is often reflective of a speaker's alertness or emotional state. Some have hypothesized that the time of an "uh" or "um" is used for the planning of future words; other researchers have suggested that they are actually to be understood as full-fledged function words rather than accidents, indicating a delay of variable time yet to come. There is some debate as to whether to consider them a form of white noise or as a meaning-filled part of language. Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. ... Function words are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning, but instead serve to express grammatical relationships with other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker. ... For other uses of the term white noise, see white noise (disambiguation). ...

Speech disfluencies have also become important in recent years with the advent of speech-to-text programs and other attempts at enabling computers to make sense of human speech. Speech recognition technologies allow computers equipped with a source of sound input, such as a microphone, to interpret human speech, e. ... A Lego RCX Computer is an example of an embedded computer used to control mechanical devices. ...

In America, since the 1980s, the word "like" has been used as a discourse marker similar to filled pauses like "um" or "uh" and is widespread among youth. For example, "I, like, don't know" instead of "I, uh, don't know" (see Valley speak for more information). The examples and perspective in this article or section may not represent a worldwide view. ... In discourse analysis, a discourse marker is a word or phrase that marks a boundary in a discourse, typically as part of a dialogue. ... Look up like in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

References

• Michael Erard, "Just Like, Er, Words, Not, Um, Throwaways," New York Times, January 3, 2004.

• Robert Eklund (PhD thesis, 2004): "Disfluency in Swedish human–human and human–machine travel booking dialogues". Chapter 2 is an account of disfluency research from a wide variety of perspectives. Download (6.3 MB): http://roberteklund.info/eklund04thesis_corrected.pdf