Disfluency is an interruption in speech that can range from small errors to stuttering. Filler words like “like” are common, and each language has its own unique fillers. Disfluency can also take the form of partial repetition or sentence repair. Humanities professors have fewer disfluencies than science professors.
A disfluency is an interruption or interruption of otherwise normal speech. Depending on the degree of disfluency involved, it can slip by without warning or make it difficult for someone to understand. In some cases, dysfluency is also combined with stuttering, which can make someone nearly incomprehensible and can also be very frustrating for the speaker. Almost everyone uses disfluencies in their speech, for a variety of reasons, and research on disfluencies has interested many linguists.
Perhaps the best known example of disfluency is a filler word. Anyone who has seen a movie featuring the valley girls remembers the “likes” littering their speech, but words like “ah,” “um,” “er,” and so on are also used as filler words in sentences. In fact, researchers have found that each language has its own unique filler words, which sound noticeably different from one another. Americans, for example, are very fond of “like”, while British speakers tend to use “er” and Spanish speakers often insert “ehhh” as a filler word.
A disfluency can also take the form of partial repetition, as in, “I said… I said I wanted to finish the dishes before I left.” Restarted sentences are a common form of disfluency, but partial repetitions in the middle of a sentence can also occur when someone loses focus or is interrupted. Sometimes just a syllable or sound is repeated, rather than a whole word.
Disfluency can also take the form of sentence repair, as someone recognizes that a mistake has been made and goes back to fix it. Humans are surprisingly good at correcting mistakes on their own, so sentence repair can draw attention to a mistake that might otherwise have passed without warning. Sentence repair often involves partial repetition, as in “cats want to sit on your lap… um, rather the cat wants to sit on your lap”.
Small errors and filler words are common in spoken languages, especially when someone is in a hurry or has difficulty conveying an idea or concept. In research conducted on disfluencies in college lectures, scientists noted that science professors tended to have the most disfluencies in lectures, while science professors had the least. The research team suggested this was because humanities professors had a range of words to choose from when discussing concepts, whereas science lecturers often have a precise library of words, making their speech less cluttered. .
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