Speech disfluency

A speech disfluency, also spelled speech dysfluency, is any of various breaks, irregularities, or non-lexical vocables which occur within the flow of otherwise fluent speech. These include "false starts", i.e. words and sentences that are cut off mid-utterance; phrases that are restarted or repeated, and repeated syllables; "fillers", i.e. grunts, and non-lexical or semiarticulate utterances such as huh, uh, erm, um, and hmm, and, in English, well, so, I mean, and like; and "repaired" utterances, i.e. instances of speakers correcting their own slips of the tongue or mispronunciations (before anyone else gets a chance to). Huh is claimed to be a universal syllable.[1]

  1. ^ Dingemanse, Mark; Torreira, Francisco; Enfield, N. J. (2013). "Is "Huh?" a Universal Word? Conversational Infrastructure and the Convergent Evolution of Linguistic Items". PLOS ONE. 8 (11): e78273. Bibcode:2013PLoSO...878273D. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0078273. PMC 3832628. PMID 24260108.