The dual status of filled pauses: Evidence from genre, proficiency and co-occurrence

Abstract

The present corpus study aims to contribute to the debate regarding the lexical or non-lexical status of filled pauses. Although they are commonly associated with hesitation, disfluency, and production difficulty, it has also been argued that they can serve more fluent communicative functions in discourse (e.g., turn-taking, stance-marking). Our work is grounded in a usage-based and discourse-functional approach to filled pauses, and we address this debate by examining the multiple characteristics of euh and eum in spoken French, as well as their co-occurrence with discourse markers. Combining quantitative and qualitative analyses, we analyze their distribution across different communication settings (prepared monologs vs. spontaneous conversations) and levels of language proficiency (native vs. non-native). Quantitative findings indicate differences in frequency, duration, position, and patterns of co-occurrence across corpora, and our qualitative analyses identify fine-grained differences, mainly two distinct patterns of distribution (initial position clustered with a discourse marker vs. medial position clustered with other hesitation markers), reflecting the different “fluent” and “disfluent” uses of filled pauses. We thus argue for a dual status of euh and eum based on formal, functional, and contextual features.

Defining Filler Particles: A Phonetic Account of the Terminology, Form, and Grammatical Classification of “Filled Pauses”

“…The question of the linguistic status (are they similar to words?) of filler particles has been around for a long time in the literature (Clark and Fox Tree 2002;Keseling 1989), together with the question of whether they are rather symptoms or signals (Finlayson and Corley 2012;Walker et al 2014), or both (Reitbrecht 2017), or both depending on their context (Kosmala and Crible 2022), being used either as fluent or disfluent constructions. At the same time, Kosmala and Crible (2022) argue against a word status of filled pauses.…”

Puzzling Patterns: Exploring the Relationship between Confidence and Filler Words in Teenage Speech

“…Researchers have raised questions regarding the meaning behind filled pauses, and several assumptions can be deduced from the current literature. Reasons such as expressing the process of decision-making and verbally marking pauses in thought without expressing emotion have been suggested as attributions to these vocalizations (Crible & Kosmala, 2021).…”

“…Additionally, regarding the sample populations in many of the foundational studies in the body of literature for this study, such as Bortfield et al in 2001, Christenfeld, 1994, Crible and Kosmala, 2021, they were either performed with university students who were over 18 years old or the studies observed corpora in university contexts, and some of these studies were also focused on mainly non-native English speakers.…”

The Speaking Disfluencies in the University Students’ Classroom Conversation

“…It means that in addition to that teachers also needs to study the other aspects such as disfluency since it is also a natural phenomena of the speech production experienced the native speakers of any language in this world (Montes et al, 2019;Liao, 2022). As a foreign language teacher, a person is wise not only to pay attention on the the correct use of the language aspect she or he is teaching in the classroom, but for a successful teaching she or he also needs to study how the foreign language students produce the category of the speaking disfluencies in their conversation in the classroom instruction (Kosmala & Crible, 2022;Buana & Ananda, 2022).…”