One of my favorite words these days, here’s an interesting article on international disfluencies.
Though a bane to teachers of public speaking, people around the world fill pauses in their own languages as naturally as watermelons have seeds. In Britain they say uh but spell it er, just as they pronounce er in butter.
The French say something that sounds like euh, and Hebrew speakers say ehhh. Serbs and Croats say ovay, and the Turks say mmmmm. The Japanese say eto (eh-to) and ano (ah-no), the Spanish este, and Mandarin speakers neige (NEH-guh) and jiege (JEH-guh). In Dutch and German you can say uh, um, mmm. In Swedish it’s eh, ah, aah, m, mm, hmm, ooh, a and oh; in Norwegian, e, eh, m and hm.
These interruptions, it turns out, plague machines more than people — speech-recognition systems in particular — so researchers have increasingly been turning their attention to uh and um (among other so-called disfluencies).
There’s a lot of study of these sorts of things today, including whether such discourse markers actually convey information themselves during conversations. Interesting.
(via BoingBoing)
I’ve been following this topic lately as well. NPR has done a few articles on it that are rather interesting. Some scientists are changing their minds from thinking that these aspects of speech are errors to being necessary pauses used by the brain while formulating a reply and are helpful to listeners as well.
I’ve had some personal experiences that would seem to support that theory. When I get excited about being asked a question about something I know a lot about (like computers) and I feel I have very little time to explain myself I can sit and rattle off information at a blistering pace without hardly a single disfluence interrupting my speech. As I’m going I’ll suddenly realize that the expression on the face of my listener will slowly start to shift to someone who’s just had a hose turned full blast into their face. If I stop and ask, they’ll have missed half or more of what I just said so I have to force myself to slow down and speak more slowly.
Ironically a computer probably wouldn’t have any problems with the pace of that sort of conversation, but the ums and uhs completely throw it off kilter. A lot of these studies have come about because of the desire to develop better speech recognition software.
Honestly, I think a lot more advancement of artificial intelligence will have to happen before a lot of these problems can be overcome. Though when you consider how two different people who grew up in the same town and speak the same language fluently can often still misunderstand each other’s meanings due to the memories and differences in life experiences that color their interpretation of the words it’s easy to wonder if computers will ever be able to understand us.