So uh, um, listen…
25 09 2008Getting a little tired of hearing politicians speech patterns being criticized as a deficiency.
Deliberate pauses when speaking are normal - filling them with silence leaves the listener with an impression of ignorance. Filling them with leading sounds such as ‘uh’ or ‘um’ are leading sounds, indicating there is more to come after the pause. The pause is usually brain action that is parsing a statement to make it more meaningful or pertinent.
What’s more psychologically telling to me is those people who can rattle off a string of paragraphs, one after another, without missing a beat. But you’ll usually notice that their inflection is dull, the tone is off and the speed of their speech is usually very fast. This is the base instinct trying to accomplish the mission of completing a rote verbal regurgitation without pausing for reflection or thought..
Wikipedia:
Fillers are parts of speech which are not generally recognized as purposeful or containing formal meaning, usually expressed as pauses such as uh, like and er, but also extending to repairs (”He was wearing a black shirt and uh, blue pants”), and articulation problems such as stuttering. Use is normally frowned upon in mass media such as news reports or films, but they occur regularly in everyday conversation, sometimes representing upwards of 20% of “words” in conversation.
Recent linguistic research has suggested that non-pathological disfluencies may contain a variety of meaning; the frequency of “uh” and “um” in English is often reflective of a speaker’s alertness or emotional state. Some have hypothesized that the time of an “uh” or “um” is used for the planning of future words; other researchers have suggested that they are actually to be understood as full-fledged function words rather than accidents, indicating a delay of variable time in which the speaker wishes to pause without voluntarily yielding control of the dialogue. There is some debate as to whether to consider them a form of white noise or as a meaning-filled part of language.
Fox Tree:
Fox Tree is also tuning into English phrases such as “you know,” “I mean,” “oh” and “like.” Her early studies suggest they’re often uttered to adjust the meaning or structure of a sentence as it’s being spoken.
For example, when a person says “I need to pick up orange juice and milk today, oh and cheese,” the “oh” suggests new information is being added that actually belonged earlier in the sentence. When someone says “She would be a good runner, I mean swimmer,” the phrase “I mean” is used to adjust or correct something that was said earlier.
So lay off the pauses and listen to what’s around them. You might be surprised at what you hear.
Homework:
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=97983&page=1
