Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
It's ironic that people think that
speech disfluencies are bad, that they
should be excised from speech,
that we should avoid them, because
they're actually a window into
the planning process. You'll see
variability in speech disfluency
depending on the difficulty of the
the topic the person is discussing.
And so when you see President Obama
producing "uhm"s,
if you watch what those "uhm"s are linked to,
it's usually a difficult question
that he's answering or a sensitive topic
that he's discussing, and it shows that
he's being very careful in choosing his words.
It's a cue to the listener that
that is what is going on.