Self Addressed Questions and Filled Pauses: A Cross-linguistic Investigation

Abstract

There is an ongoing debate whether phenomena of disfluency (such as filled pauses) are produced communicatively. Clark and Fox Tree (Cognition 84(1):73-111, 2002) propose that filled pauses are words, and that different forms signal different lengths of delay. This paper evaluates this Filler-As-Words hypothesis by analyzing the distribution of self-addressed-questions or SAQs (such as "what's the word") in relation to filled pauses. We found that SAQs address different problems in different languages (most frequently about memory-retrieval in English and Chinese, and about appropriateness in Japanese). In relation to filled pauses, British but not American English uses "um" to signal a more severe problem than "uh". Chinese uses different filled pauses to signal the syntactic category of the problem constituent. Japanese uses different filled pauses to signal levels of interaction with the interlocuter. Overall, our data supports the Filler-As-Words hypothesis that filled pauses are used communicatively. However, the dimensions of its meanings vary across languages and dialects.

Grammar Is a System That Characterizes Talk in Interaction

“…Clark and FoxTree (2002), following an earlier proposal by James (1972) and based on data from the London Lund corpus, claim that the choice of ‘um’ vs. ‘uh’ reflects an explicit choice by the speaker—the former selected when the speaker faces a relatively significant difficulty which will lead to a longer wait for the resumption of the utterance; for dissent against this claim see e.g., O'Connell and Kowal (2005) and Corley and Stewart (2008) Recently, Tian et al (2016) demonstrate significant preference for ‘um’ v. ‘uh’ among speakers of British English before self addressed questions (e.g., ‘What do they call it?’ ‘what's her name?’)—a clear signal of major difficulty, but no significant difference among speakers of American English (data from Switchboard); they also demonstrate marked preference for certain hesitation markers in Japanese and Chinese on the basis of distinct syntactic contexts. Wieling et al (2016) demonstrate significant differences in the choice of ‘um’ vs. ‘uh’ (and their cross-linguistic variants) both between male/female and younger/older speakers in four Germanic languages (Dutch, English, German, and Norwegian).…”

“Um…, it’s really difficult to… um… speak fluently”: Neural tracking of spontaneous speech

“…This finding contributes to an ongoing debate about whether the insertion of fillers into spontaneous speech is a conscious choice of the speaker, just as it is for meaningful words, or if their production is more similar to the insertion of pauses, which are often simply a by-product of production delays (Clark and Fox Tree, 2002; Tian et al, 2017; Silber-Varod et al, 2021). To our knowledge, this is the first study to look directly at the neural response to fillers.…”

“…Fillers can take on different forms, however, their prevalence across a multitude of spoken languages (e.g. Wieling et al, 2016; Tian et al, 2017) suggests it is a core feature of spontaneous speech. Although fillers do not, in and of themselves, contribute specific lexical information, they are also not mere glitches in speech production.…”

Listener- Versus Speaker-Oriented Disfluencies in Autistic Adults: Insights From Wearable Eye-Tracking and Skin Conductance Within a Live Face-to-Face Paradigm

“…To our knowledge, metalinguistic comments in autism are understudied, and our study is exploratory in this respect. Self-addressed questions on disfluencies in oral corpora have not been extensively studied, but their meaning seems to be culture dependent (Eckardt & Csipak, 2021;Ginzburg et al, 2013;Tian et al, 2017); in Chinese and English, they seem to mainly signal word-retrieval issues (e.g., What/Where/ Who was it? ), whereas in Japanese, they seem to focus on phrasing appropriateness (e.g., How to say it?).…”