We all know speakers who utter "uh" and "um" a lot. Now it turns out that those sounds, along with different pronounciations of "the," can provide valuable clues about speech patterns.
Stanford psychology professor Herbert Clark and colleague Jean Fox Tree, a researcher at UC-Santa Cruz, used computers to sift through 3.3 million words of transcribed speech. They found that 81 percent of the time that people pronounced "the" as "thee," it was followed by a pause. Similarly, "uh" appears before a short delay in speech (averaging 2.65 seconds), while "um" shows up before longer silences (averaging 8.83 seconds).
"I don't think of these things as disfluencies anymore," says Clark, '62. "They are little techniques we have for dealing with the problems in speech."
