Hesitations are a vital part of spontaneous speech, occurring naturally as delays in speech delivery. Research shows that silent and filled pauses are the most frequent interruptions to the speech flow, however hesitation phenomena have a broader range, reflecting certain speaker strategies that can be in part learned from a speech community. Here, we examine the effects of regional dialect of American English (South, Midwest), gender (male, female), and age (children, adults) on the type and frequency of hesitations. Based on acoustic analyses of spontaneous narratives (64 speakers), we developed an 8-category taxonomy of hesitations, considering their nature, acoustic characteristics, and the distribution in our sample. We found that hesitations were dependent on age, gender, and dialect. Children had higher rates of segmental prolongations and self-repairs than adults, and adults had more filled pauses and repetitions than children. Filled pauses and lexical fillers were more frequent in males than females, and prolongations and complex fillers were more frequent in females than males. Prolongations and lip smacks were more prevalent in the South, and lexical fillers and silent pauses were more frequent in the Midwest. Our analyses indicate that hesitations have communicative functions, being shaped by sociocultural and developmental factors.
Jacewicz et al. (Wed,) studied this question.