Human speech is peppered with ums and uhs, among other signs of hesitation in the planning process. But are these so-called fillers (or filled pauses) intentionally uttered by speakers, or are they side-effects of difficulties in the planning process? And how do listeners respond to them? In the present paper we review evidence concerning the production and comprehension of fillers such as um a...

This paper deals with the signals that are used to express hesitation and uncertainty in conversational interactions. It studies the relation between gesturing, body posture, facial expressions, and speech, and draws conclusions of their role and function in the interpretation and coordination of interaction with respect to the basic enablements of communication. Dialogues are assumed to be coo...

The conjunctions att ‘that’ and och ‘and’ in Swedish are examined with the goal of finding prosodic and segmental cues distinguishing between their occurrence in fluent and hesitation disfluency contexts (when followed by a pause). Analysis of data indicates the following major tendencies: 1. the mean F0 in the function words does not differ significantly in hesitation and fluent contexts where...

This paper deals with the contextual analysis of the vocalic hesitation euh in French in a corpus of human elicited answers. Through the analysis of the contextual combinatorial patterns, the new information introductory role of this vocalic hesitation is investigated. Observations supports trends noticed in other languages and suggest potential optimization for question answering automatic sys...

introduction: the purpose of this study was to investigate the role of patience and its components (transcendence, tolerance, contentment, persistence, and hesitation) in predicting bullying among primary school children in shiraz, iran. another purpose was to compare patience and bullying between male and female students. method: the participants were 317 elementary school students (169 female...

Building on psychologists' observations that individuals with Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) speak slower and more quietly, this study examines to what extent the characteristics of hesitation disfluencies and silent pauses distinguish between SAD and control participants. Participants responded verbally to six identical questions, and their responses were recorded and analyzed. Our first observ...