Speech Disfluency - Research

Research

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 in which the speaker wishes to pause without voluntarily yielding control of the dialogue. There is some debate as to whether to consider them a form of white noise or as a meaning-filled part of language.

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.

Read more about this topic:  Speech Disfluency

Famous quotes containing the word research:

    If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical-minded affairs.
    Peter B. Medawar (1915–1987)

    ... research is never completed ... Around the corner lurks another possibility of interview, another book to read, a courthouse to explore, a document to verify.
    Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897–1973)

    It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.
    Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989)