Hesitation Phenomena in Spontaneous English Speech

1959/01/01 by Howard Maclay, Charles E. Osgood · 771 citations
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Cognitive psychology #Computer science #Encoding (memory) #Epistemology #Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies #Linguistic Studies and Language Acquisition #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Linguistics #Nothing #Philosophy #Psychology

paper · doi:10.1080/00437956.1959.11659682

published in WORD 15(1), 19-44 (Taylor & Francis)

openalex publication_date 1959/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23

Abstract

[This paper reports an exploratory investigation of hesitation phenomena in spontaneously spoken English. Following a brief review of the literature bearing on such phenomena, a quantitative study of filled and unfilled pauses, repeats, and false starts in the speech of some twelve participants in a conference is described. Analysis in terms of both individual differences and linguistic distribution is made, and some psycholinguistic implications are drawn, particularly as to the nature of encoding units and their relative uncertainty. A distinction between non-chance statistical dependencies and all-or-nothing dependencies in linguistic methodology is made.]

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