This paper concerns the different ways in which hesitation, and hesitation related phenomena like uncertainty, doubt and other phenomena where lack of knowledge is involved are expressed in different cultures. The paper focuses especially on shoulder shrugging as a signal of hesitation or uncertainty, and starts from the observation that shoulder shrugging has different interpretations dependin...

Spoken language is full of disfluencies. A frequent sound expressing hesitation is uh (or any variant thereof), but its linguistic status is debated. This article offers a new perspective on hesitation particles. First, the position is defended that they are linguistic signals, hence words, and it is shown that they belong to the larger class of interjections on the basis of a number of qualita...

The authors of this article were invited members of a workgroup sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in the fall of 2013. They came away convinced that a more holistic perspective of childhood vaccination is necessary in order to understand and ultimately address the complex, multi-faceted issues surrounding vaccine hesitancy and vaccine acceptance in the United States. The au...

Vaccine hesitancy is an important issue to be addressed, due to the risk of decrease of vaccination coverage and consequent control of preventable diseases. While it is not considered a specific determinant, poor or inadequate communication can contribute to vaccine hesitancy and negatively influence vaccination uptake. As a contribution to the ongoing discussion regarding this theme and in the...

We investigate segment prolongation as a means of disfluent hesitation in spontaneous German speech. We describe phonetic and structural features of disfluent prolongation and compare it to data of other languages and to non-disfluent prolongations.

There are three basic questions in the area of highway fiscal policy which have not, at least in recent years, been considered, faced directly, and answered by the State. These are: (1 ) How much should we be spending on our highway, road, and street systems? (2 ) Are we dis­ tributing available funds among the various types and classes of roads in the most equitable and efficient manner? (3 ) ...

As a scientist with epidemiologic training, it has long been clear to me that the benefits of vaccines outweigh the risks, both on the individual and on the societal level. Both of my children are fully immunized on the standard schedule. Many of my friends’ children are not. When my 8-year-old was a toddler, I once noted that he was the only child in a playgroup who had received all of his vac...

In many online shopping applications, such as Amazon and eBay, traditional Association Rule (AR) mining has limitations as it only deals with the items that are sold but ignores the items that are almost sold (for example, those items that are put into the basket but not checked out). We say that those almost sold items carry hesitation information, since customers are hesitating to buy them. T...

Conversational spoken dialogue systems that interact with the user rather than merely reading the text can be equipped with hesitations to manage dialogue flow and user attention. Based on a series of empirical studies, we elaborated a hesitation synthesis strategy for dialogue systems, which inserts hesitations of a scalable extent wherever needed in the ongoing utterance. Previously, evaluati...