Background
Automatic speech has sparked research in many different fields since a long time ago. Modern linguists led by Leonard Bloomfield in 1933 call these "hesitation forms"—the sounds of stammering (uh), stuttering (um, um), throat-clearing (ahem!), stalling (well, um, that is), interjected when the speaker is groping for words or at a loss for the next thought.
French psychiatrist Jules Séglas, on the other hand, referred to the term embolalia, as "the regular addition of prefixes or suffixes to words", and mentioned that the behavior is sometimes used by normal individuals to demonstrate to their interlocutor that they are paying attention to the conversation.
Harry Levin and Irene Silverman called automatic speech "vocal segregates" in their 1965 paper on hesitation phenomena and found out from their experiments on children that these segregates seem to be less voluntary hesitation phenomena and may be signs of uncontrolled emotionality under stress.
The Irish poet William Butler Yeats argued for automatic speech experiments with his wife, which provided him with symbols for his poetry as well as literary theories.
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