Stuttering, also known as stammering, is a speech disorder in which the flow of speech is disrupted by involuntary repetitions and prolongations of sounds, syllables, words, or phrases as well as involuntary silent pauses or blocks in which the person who stutters is unable to produce sounds. The term stuttering is most commonly associated with involuntary sound repetition, but it also encompasses the abnormal hesitation or pausing before speech, referred to by people who stutter as blocks, and the prolongation of certain sounds, usually vowels or semivowels. According to Watkins et al., stuttering is a disorder of "selection, initiation, and execution of motor sequences necessary for fluent speech production". For many people who stutter, repetition is the main concern. The term "stuttering" covers a wide range of severity, from barely perceptible impediments that are largely cosmetic to severe symptoms that effectively prevent oral communication. Almost 70 million people worldwide stutter, about 1% of the world's population.
In spoken language analysis, an utterance is a continuous piece of speech, by one person, before or after which there is silence on the part of the person. In the case of oral languages, it is generally, but not always, bounded by silence. Utterances do not exist in written language; only their representations do. They can be represented and delineated in written language in many ways.
An interjection is a word or expression that occurs as an utterance on its own and expresses a spontaneous feeling or reaction. It is a diverse category, encompassing many different parts of speech, such as exclamations (ouch!, wow!), curses (damn!), greetings, response particles, hesitation markers, and other words. Due to its diverse nature, the category of interjections partly overlaps with a few other categories like profanities, discourse markers, and fillers. The use and linguistic discussion of interjections can be traced historically through the Greek and Latin Modistae over many centuries.
Paralanguage, also known as vocalics, is a component of meta-communication that may modify meaning, give nuanced meaning, or convey emotion, by using techniques such as prosody, pitch, volume, intonation, etc. It is sometimes defined as relating to nonphonemic properties only. Paralanguage may be expressed consciously or unconsciously.
In the broadest sense of the word, a vocable is any meaningful sound uttered by people, such as a word or term, that is fixed by their language and culture. Use of the words in the broad sense is archaic and the term is instead used for utterances which are not considered words, such as the English vocables of assent and denial, uh-huh and uh-uh, or the vocable of error, uh-oh.
In linguistics, prosody is the study of elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments but which are properties of syllables and larger units of speech, including linguistic functions such as intonation, stress, and rhythm. Such elements are known as suprasegmentals.
A word is a basic element of language that carries an objective or practical meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consensus among linguists on its definition and numerous attempts to find specific criteria of the concept remain controversial. Different standards have been proposed, depending on the theoretical background and descriptive context; these do not converge on a single definition. Some specific definitions of the term "word" are employed to convey its different meanings at different levels of description, for example based on phonological, grammatical or orthographic basis. Others suggest that the concept is simply a convention used in everyday situations.
Cluttering is a speech and communication disorder characterized by a rapid rate of speech, erratic rhythm, and poor syntax or grammar, making speech difficult to understand.
A filled pause is a non-silent pause in a otherwise fluent speech, where instead of a silent pause there is a filler. The filler can be non-lexical or semiarticulate utterances such as huh, uh, erm, um, and hmm, and, in English, well, so, I mean, and like.
Formulaic language is a linguistic term for verbal expressions that are fixed in form, often non-literal in meaning with attitudinal nuances, and closely related to communicative-pragmatic context. Along with idioms, expletives and proverbs, formulaic language includes pause fillers and conversational speech formulas.
A speech error, commonly referred to as a slip of the tongue or misspeaking, is a deviation from the apparently intended form of an utterance. They can be subdivided into spontaneously and inadvertently produced speech errors and intentionally produced word-plays or puns. Another distinction can be drawn between production and comprehension errors. Errors in speech production and perception are also called performance errors. Some examples of speech error include sound exchange or sound anticipation errors. In sound exchange errors, the order of two individual morphemes is reversed, while in sound anticipation errors a sound from a later syllable replaces one from an earlier syllable. Slips of the tongue are a normal and common occurrence. One study shows that most people can make up to as much as 22 slips of the tongue per day.
In linguistics, a filler, filled pause, hesitation marker or planner is a sound or word that participants in a conversation use to signal that they are pausing to think but are not finished speaking. These are not to be confused with placeholder names, such as thingamajig, whatchamacallit, whosawhatsa and whats'isface, which refer to objects or people whose names are temporarily forgotten, irrelevant, or unknown. Fillers fall into the category of formulaic language, and different languages have different characteristic filler sounds. The term filler also has a separate use in the syntactic description of wh-movement constructions.
A discourse marker is a word or a phrase that plays a role in managing the flow and structure of discourse. Since their main function is at the level of discourse rather than at the level of utterances or sentences, discourse markers are relatively syntax-independent and usually do not change the truth conditional meaning of the sentence. They can also indicate what a speaker is doing on a variety of different planes. Examples of discourse markers include the particles oh, well, now, then, you know, and I mean, and the discourse connectives so, because, and, but, and or. The term discourse marker was popularized by Deborah Schiffrin in her 1987 book Discourse Markers.
Herbert Herb Clark is a psycholinguist currently serving as Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. His focuses include cognitive and social processes in language use; interactive processes in conversation, from low-level disfluencies through acts of speaking and understanding to the emergence of discourse; and word meaning and word use. Clark is known for his theory of "common ground": individuals engaged in conversation must share knowledge in order to be understood and have a meaningful conversation. Together with Deanna Wilkes-Gibbs (1986), he also developed the collaborative model, a theory for explaining how people in conversation coordinate with one another to determine definite references. Clark's books include Semantics and Comprehension, Psychology and Language: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics, Arenas of Language Use and Using Language.
Jean E. Fox Tree is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Fox Tree studies collateral signals that people use in spontaneous speech, such as fillers, prosodic information, fillers, and speech disfluencies.
Language production is the production of spoken or written language. In psycholinguistics, it describes all of the stages between having a concept to express and translating that concept into linguistic forms. These stages have been described in two types of processing models: the lexical access models and the serial models. Through these models, psycholinguists can look into how speeches are produced in different ways, such as when the speaker is bilingual. Psycholinguists learn more about these models and different kinds of speech by using language production research methods that include collecting speech errors and elicited production tasks.
Speech production is the process by which thoughts are translated into speech. This includes the selection of words, the organization of relevant grammatical forms, and then the articulation of the resulting sounds by the motor system using the vocal apparatus. Speech production can be spontaneous such as when a person creates the words of a conversation, reactive such as when they name a picture or read aloud a written word, or imitative, such as in speech repetition. Speech production is not the same as language production since language can also be produced manually by signs.
Developmental dysfluency, or "normal dysfluency", is a lack of language fluency that occurs during early childhood development. It is commonly observed in children ages 2 to 4 years old. This typically occurs as they begin to learn language and communication skills. Developmental dysfluency refers to speech that is continually interrupted rather than flowing naturally. Developmental dysfluency is most commonly expressed through inconsistencies in speech such as stuttering, repetition, lengthening of sounds and syllables, mistiming, and poor inflection.
In linguistics, a backchanneling during a conversation occurs when one participant is speaking and another participant interjects responses to the speaker. A backchannel response can be verbal, non-verbal, or both. Backchannel responses are often phatic expressions, primarily serving a social or meta-conversational purpose, such as signifying the listener's attention, understanding, sympathy, or agreement, rather than conveying significant information. Examples of backchanneling in English include such expressions as "yeah", "OK", "uh-huh", "hmm", "right", and "I see".
English interjections are a category of English words – such as yeah, ouch, Jesus, oh, mercy, yuck, etc. – whose defining features are the infrequency with which they combine with other words to form phrases, their loose connection to other elements in clauses, and their tendency to express emotive meaning. These features separate English interjections from the language's other lexical categories, such as nouns and verbs. Though English interjections, like interjections in general, are often overlooked in descriptions of the language, English grammars do offer minimal descriptions of the category.
