The Presence of ‘Um’ as a Marker of Truthfulness in the Speech of TV Personalities

Abstract

The aim of this study is to determine whether the presence of the interjection 'um' can distinguish between the deceptive and truthful speech of individuals who are practised in the art of impression management. A total of 50 truthful and 61 deceptive statements were extracted from the speech of celebrities participating in a televised comedy panel show where celebrity guests try to convince an opposing team of their truthfulness. Participants' use of 'um' (measured as a percentage of the total word count of each statement) was analysed. The results show that, on average, 'um' was used almost three times as often in the speakers' true statements compared to their false ones. A discriminant analysis revealed that the presence of 'um' is more effective than human judgement alone in determining veracity. These findings suggest that the presence of the filler 'um' in speech is useful in the identification of true versus false oral statements.

A natural language processing approach reveals first-person pronoun usage and non-fluency as markers of therapeutic alliance in psychotherapy

“…In natural language, honest and emotionally regulated speech often contains non-fluency. 26 , 27 This offers a plausible explanation for our finding that in our sample, patients who reported stronger alliance were more honest and more willing to effectively communicate their emotions to their therapists. The probability of the auxiliary verb token transitioning to the filler word token also identified the end of patients’ sentences being acknowledged by therapists (e.g.…”

“…Second, relaxed styles during interactions have been observed as markers of highly affiliative relationships. 24 For example, the frequency of filler pauses (“um”), indicating relaxed production of natural speech, was associated with multiple indices of high alliance interactions, 25 such as a speaker’s truthfulness, 26 emotional suppression, 27 and increased attention during a storytelling task in healthy volunteers. 28 Linguistic coordination in usage of the similar words and the rates at which they are said between two people have been shown to predict empathy, social support, and positive outcomes in individual therapy 29 , 30 , 31 and online mental health support communities.…”

The effect of episodic future thinking ability on subjective cue use when judging credibility

“…Here, participants report to see the cue as indicating deception while in the literature these cues are considered as truthfulness indicators (Amado et al, 2016; Strömwall et al, 2004; Vrij et al, 2011). For the cues filler words and repeated words (Study 2), and the cue accent (Study 1) for truthful judgement, there is conflicting evidence in the deception literature; see Lev‐Ari and Keysar (2010); Villar and Castillo (2016); Vrij and Nahari (2017).…”

Digital Humanities, Corpus and Language Technology: A look from diverse case studies

“…full pauses, negation, adverbs, verb tenses, pronouns, number of syllables, number of sentences, number of big words, number of syllables per word, number of short sentences, number of long sentences, average number of words per sentence, conjunctions, simple sentences and adjectives (Burgoon et al, 2003;Fitzpatrick and Bachenko, 2009;Picornell, 2013;Villar and Castillo, 2016). Currently, the coding of filled pauses, pronouns, adverbs, reported memory, in addition to those previously mentioned, is part of the tasks of the coordinator of this research and the first results are expected to be available in March 2022.…”