The evaluation of unfilled pauses: Limits of the prestige, solidarity and dynamism dimensions

Schleef, Erik

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2019.06.008

Cited by 4 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…Here pauses have social meaning to add in feature combinations, but this social meaning is very different from that of you know and like . The pause guises are heard as more statusful than neutral guises (see Schleef 2019). While you know guises do not appear to be significantly different from neutral guises in the Status dimension, pause + like guises are heard as less statusful than neutral guises (the effect size for the DP like by itself indicates a similar trend; see Table 3).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Unfilled pauses can combine with many pragmatic markers. They differ from some pragmatic markers, for example the discourse particle like , in that unfilled pauses are not subject to the same degree of social salience as like is (Schleef 2019). While this is also true for the pragmatic marker you know (Beeching 2016:151), the latter shares with the discourse particle a manner of evaluation that differs from that of unfilled pauses.…”

Section: Analytical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…In order to find out whether pauses are subject to evaluation that could be documented in the matched-guise framework, I conducted a pilot study on the evaluation of unfilled pauses comparing them with speech without such pauses (Schleef 2019). Results have shown that pauses seem to be entangled in a complex web of indexical meaning: they are evaluated on a Prestige and a Dynamism dimension, but not at all on the Solidarity dimension.…”

Section: Pauses Pragmatic Markers and Their Evaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Mechanisms of meaning making in the co-occurrence of pragmatic markers with silent pauses

Schleef

2021

Lang. Soc.

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This study explores the social meanings of unfilled pauses, you know, like, and combinations thereof by comparing the evaluation of speech with these features to speech without them. The comparison is based on a set of perception surveys in which participants listened to manipulated audio stimuli and rated them on a series of scales. Unfilled pauses are evaluated differently from all other features: they are rated high on Status and low on Dynamism. Where significant differences emerge, the pragmatic markers you know, like, and combinations of pauses with these are always rated lower than the guises without. They are most sensitive to personal characteristics in the Dynamism dimension, followed by Conversational Skills, Likeability, and Status. The mechanism that adapts the potential social meanings of linguistic features when they are combined hinges on the social salience of the features in question. Various outcomes are possible ranging from additive to non-additive effects. (Like, you know, attitudes, social meanings, prestige, solidarity, dynamism)

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Analytical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 93%

Section: Pauses Pragmatic Markers and Their Evaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Mechanisms of meaning making in the co-occurrence of pragmatic markers with silent pauses

Schleef

2021

Lang. Soc.

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“…The signal hypothesis interprets disfluencies like um and uh as tools speakers use to signal something (e.g., delay or new/complex upcoming information, metacognitive status, structural boundaries) to the listener [61,[194][195][196]. Likewise, silence can signal syntactic structure, utterance boundaries, rhetorical and expressive emphasis, or stylistic/identity peculiarities [68,197]. Of course, neither hypothesis need exclude the other.…”

Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 99%

Variation isn’t that hard: Morphosyntactic choice does not predict production difficulty

et al. 2021

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The following paper explores the link between production difficulty and grammatical variability. Using a sub-sample of the Switchboard Corpus of American English (285 transcripts, 34 speakers), this paper shows that the presence of variable contexts does not positively correlate with two metrics of production difficulty, namely filled pauses (um and uh) and unfilled pauses (speech planning time). When 20 morphosyntactic variables are considered collectively (N= 6,268), there is no positive effect. In other words, variable contexts do not correlate with measurable production difficulties. These results challenge the view that grammatical variability is somehow sub-optimal for speakers, with additional burdensome cognitive planning.

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An experimental study of the detection of clicks in English

Vigil¹,

Pinto²

2020

P&C

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This experimental study sets out to determine whether people detect click sounds in American English. Recent research has documented the use of non-phonemic clicks in a variety of languages to fulfill a range of functions such as sequence management or signaling searches and different types of attitudinal stance. While these clicks are acoustically salient and have been reported to occur with a frequency of up to 14 per minute in British English, they have not been widely investigated until relatively recently. For this experiment, we designed video stimuli consisting of A and B pairs of approximately 10 seconds of speech, one with a click and the other with the click edited out. We gave 118 participants a questionnaire and asked if they could detect a difference between the pairs of videos. The results indicate that the majority of participants, between 79% and 86%, do not detect click sounds.

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The evaluation of unfilled pauses: Limits of the prestige, solidarity and dynamism dimensions

Cited by 4 publications

References 41 publications

Mechanisms of meaning making in the co-occurrence of pragmatic markers with silent pauses

Mechanisms of meaning making in the co-occurrence of pragmatic markers with silent pauses

Variation isn’t that hard: Morphosyntactic choice does not predict production difficulty

An experimental study of the detection of clicks in English

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