Speech Disfluency - Language-dependence

Language-dependence

Research in computational linguistics has revealed a correlation between native language and patterns of disfluencies in spontaneously uttered speech. In addition to this research, there are other subjective accounts reported by individuals. According to one commentator, Americans use pauses such as "um" or "uh," the British say "er" or "erm", the French use "euh", the Germans say "äh" (pronounced eh or er), Japanese use "ā", "anō", or "ēto", and Spanish speakers say "ehhh" (also used in Hebrew), "como" (normally meaning 'like'), and "este" (normally meaning 'this'). Besides "er" and "uh", the Portuguese use "hã or é". In Mandarin "nà gè" and "zhè ge" ('that' and 'this') are used. In Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian, speakers vocalize an "ovaj". Arabic speakers say "يعني", the pronunciation of which is close to "yaa'ni", or, (literally, "he means", there being no grammatically gender-neutral third person) and in Turkish, they say "şey" in addition to "yani" (without the found in Arabic) and "ııı". A more complete list can be found on the fillers page.