This Post Is About, Umm... Disfluency

I'm a slow talker. If you were being kind, you might describe the pace of my pace as "pensive." If you were being accurate, you might describe it as "bumbling." As a result of my slowness, I say "uh," and especially "um" a lot. A whole lot. So much, in fact, that my son frequently demands out of frustration that I "stop saying um!" In the literature, such verbal fillers, and the related, "er," "I mean," "you know," and in children from the 80s and the Aughts, "like," are mercifully referred to as disfluencies, or even more mercifully as "performance additions." And over the last decade, psycholinguists (not a very merciful name) have found that they may actually play important roles in speech.

Traditionally, "uh" and "um" were thought to be involuntary products of a momentary difficulty in processing what one wants to say, or in deciding whether one actually wants to say it, and therefore are meaningless themselves. Alternatively, they were seen as merely a means of preventing people from interrupting during a pause in speaking. There's an obvious problem with this view, though. Why do we have more than one such marker of disfluency? In fact, English isn't the only language with more than one. Clark and Fox Tree¹ found equivalents of both "uh" and "um" or similar fillers in multiple languages, including Japanese, Spanish, Norwiegan, Swedish, Dutch, French, German, and Hebrew. Distinct elements with no differences rarely survive in a language, much less several languages from different families, so there must be something to "uh" and "um."

Clark and Fox Tree conducted several studies using data from both laboratory experiments and the London–Lund corpus of British English, and concluded that "uh" and "um" have all the properties required to be a words in English:

•  Phonetics: They have distinct sounds.
• Prosody: "When placed within intonation units, hey are normally delivered with a parenthetical intonation, a monotone pitch that allows them to be segregated from the melody of the surrounding construction" (p. 104). In other words, we have distinct ways of speaking them relative to the words around them.
• Syntax: Well, according to Clark and Fox Tree, they're interjections, like "like," or "oh!" so they don't really have associated syntactical rules.
• Semantics: They have distinct meanings.

The meanings are the interesting part to me. According to Clark and Fox Tree, "uh" and "um" both signal pauses in speech, but they refer to pauses of different lengths. Specifically, their experimental data suggests that people use "uh" to signal a short pause, and "um" to signal a long one. This explains why I use "um" so often: my pauses are as long as my posts.

Subsequent research has found that "uh" and "um" may have even more specific meanings. For example, using an eye-tracker (an apparatus that monitors where on a screen a participant is looking), Arnold et al² found that participants who heard "uh" while listening to speech referring to objects on a screen immediately looked to objects that had not yet been mentioned. So it seems that "uh" not only signals a pause, but more importantly, tells the listener that the speaker is about to refer to something new, or as a later study by Arnold and colleagues found³, to something unfamiliar.

Further evidence suggests that it may not just be new, but also important things that "uh" and "um" signal. Collard et al³ found that after listening to speech that referred to several different objects, participants given a surprise memory test were more likely to remember having heard words that were preceded by "uh" or "um" than words that weren't, suggesting that when they heard "uh" or "um," they devoted more attention to what came next.

There is mounting evidence, then, that "uh" and "um" are more than just involuntary veral tics. Instead, they seem to carry meaning, signalling a pause and perhaps that something new, unfamiliar, or important is about to be said. Researchers are still trying to sort these things out, though, and there are still open questions. For example, Finlayson and Corley⁵ have shown that people are equally likely to use "uh" and "um" in monologues and dialogues, suggesting that, while they may convey information to listeners, speakers may not intentionally use them to do so. I look forward to learning how such questions are answered by future research, though. If nothing else, I will learn more about why I say "um" so much so that I can explain it to my son when he asks me to stop.


1 Clark, H.H., and Fox Tree, J.E. (2002). Using uh and um in spontaneous speaking. Cognition, 84, 73-111.

2 Arnold, J.E., Tanenhaus, M.K., Altmann, R.J., and Fagnano, M. (2004). The old and thee, uh, new: Disfluency and reference resolution. Psychological Science, 15(9), 578-582.

3 Arnold, J.E., Hudson Kam, C.L., and Tanenhaus, M.K. (2007). If you say thee uh you are describing something hard: The on-line attribution of disfluency during reference comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33(5), 914-930.

4 Corley, M., MacGregor, L.J., and Donaldson, D.I. (2007). It's the way that you, er, say it: Hesitations in speech affect language comprehension. Cognition, 105, 658-668.

5 Finlayson, I.R., and Corley, M. (2012). Disfluency in dialogue: an intentional signal from the speaker? Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 19(5), 921-928.