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From: Florence Myers
Date: 19 Apr 2010
Time: 14:05:45 -0500
Remote Name: 192.160.130.43
Judy, in my view, you opened up an issue that is worthy of a doctoral dissertation; that is, to research the phenonmenon of hesitations. Hesitations may be relatively easy to measure acoustically. However, to interpret the acoustic data in a meaningful linguistic and communicative sense is not easy, in my view. That is, the interpretation of what hesitations are (linguistically and pragmatically) "appropriate" vs "not appropriate" requires much more study. Indeed, some classic studies from the psych literature show that listeners may actually "perceive" hesitations where there aren't and vice versa. Yet, to count all acoustically present hesitations may not be clinically and perceptually meaningful as everyone speaks with unfilled pauses. In fact, gifted orators use pauses for effect; such pauses would and should not be considered "disfluencies" and should not be combined with pauses that are "inappropriate" that may give rise to the perception of irregular rate (e.g., when hesitations occur in the middle of a phrase rather than clause/phrase boundaries). Thanks for raising an important issue. I think we are only beginning to come to grips with hesitations. Perhaps counting all hesitations is a beginning. As with any area that is worthy of study, asking the right questions is a first step.