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Don’t, uh, Necessarily Worry About “Um”

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm:

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Back when I taught public speaking in college, I had a colleague who was so committed to exorcising her frequent use of “um,” that she asked an associate to sit at the back of her classroom and hold up a sign with “um” written in foot-high letters every time she made that sound. That, of course, is the overreaction of a perfectionist. But most speakers — particularly the less experienced ones — are troubled from time to time by their tendency to add “um” or “uh” or “oh” to their speech. In practice, however, it is generally not worth the worry. Aside from being forgiven — particularly for less experienced speakers — these communication characteristics are shown by the research to be not just generally benign but actually helpful in some circumstances. 

The “um,” the “er,” or the “ah” are referred to as a “filled pause,” because that is how they function. Speech-wise, it is simply a pause to which you’ve added a vocalization. You make a sound essentially to hold the floor and to keep the communication channels open while you think of the next word or phrase. From an audience’s perspective, much of the benefit comes from the pause: Listeners need a break and a chance to focus on what is coming next. But some of the benefits are independent of the pause, because they play a role in conveying and augmenting the speaker’s own thought processes. That doesn’t excuse a speech that is chock-full of disfluency, but when it comes to the normal and natural use of a few “um’s,” this post aims to reduce your guilt.

The Research: It’s, ah, Not Really a Bad Thing

We are aware of the advice from our public speaking teachers and our speech coaches. But what do the studies say on the effect of filled pauses?  I bet you didn’t know there is research on “um,” but it turns out there is, and this is just a small sample of it.

One study (Fox Tree & Schrock, 1998) looked at speech comprehension of words followed by a filler “oh,” in one condition, or with the “oh” excised in another, or followed by a pause of the same length in the third condition. Comparing the participant’s recognition speed in all three conditions, the researchers found that word recognition was faster after the “oh” even though the “oh,” of course, adds no real meaning.

Another study (Corley & Hartsuiker, 2003) tested the theory that filled pauses serve the function of setting the audience up to understand slightly harder content. The theory goes that it is slightly harder for the speaker (prompting the “um” as the speaker composes on the fly), so it is likely to be slightly harder for the listener as well.  This team conducted two experiments showing that when filled pauses occurred before words, the use of the filled pause led to a quicker response from the research participants.

In another study (Brennan & Schober, 2001), subjects were given instructions for selecting an object on a computer screen, and those instructions were given in a manner that was either fluent or disfluent (accompanied by “uh’s,” “um’s” and corrections). Listeners were able to select a target more quickly and with no less accuracy after the disfluent instructions. The researchers theorize that the disfluent instructions gave listeners more time to process and more time to mentally correct misleading information.

Finally, more recently, and most applicable to a legal setting, a group of researchers (Benus, Levitan & Hirschberg, 2012) looked at filled pauses during Supreme Court oral arguments. They found that a correlation in similarity between counsel’s and a given justice’s filled pauses correlated with a favorable vote from that justice. In other words, when persuasion was occurring, then the lawyer’s and the judge’s filled pauses tended to be in sync: “Um” together and your arguments will hum together.

The Caveats: Don’t, er, Go Overboard

I can’t responsibly end this post without cautioning that nothing in either the research or the practicalities suggests that communicators should go hog-wild on the use of filled pauses. It isn’t a “the-more-the-better” kind of thing. Instead, the filled pause is generally benign or even helpful when it is natural and conversational. That suggests a few final notes.

Don’t Fall Into a Pattern

When an “um” falls in between every single sentence, the filled pauses call attention to themselves and become a distraction. For that reason, it makes sense for speakers to still try to eliminate “um’s.” For most of us, some will still leak through, but they’ll occur in more natural ways, like when we are truly thinking.

Don’t Let “Um” Be a First Impression

There is research on the other side of the question showing that the use of “um” and “uh” in some settings also invites the impression that speakers don’t know what they’re talking about (Brennan & Williams, 1995) . On the one hand, that underscores the need to still keep filled pauses to a minimum, but it also reinforces the need to manage first impressions, and perhaps save your “um’s” for after you have demonstrated your credibility.

Don’t Feel Like You Need an Excuse to Pause

Pausing is power. For either a speaker or a witness, it conveys control over content and pacing, and it draws attention like a magnet to whatever is coming next. Unless you’re in a rapid-fire conversation, you generally don’t need to hold the floor with a vocalization. Just pause, there’s no need to fill that pause in with anything. Silence can feel odd to the speaker, but generally doesn’t seem so to the audience.

This is one of those topics where it is nice to have the privileged position of the writer. I edit, not as much as I should in all likelihood, but I do have the luxury of being able to pause, select and revise all without the reader seeing it. Bottom line: If you could read my “um’s,” they’d be all over the place.

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Benus, S., Levitan, R., & Hirschberg, J. (2012). Entrainment in spontaneous speech: the case of filled pauses in Supreme Court hearings. In 3rd IEEE Conference on Cognitive Infocommunications, Kosice, Slovakia.

Brennan, S. E., & Williams, M. (1995). The Feeling of Another? s Knowing: Prosody and Filled Pauses as Cues to Listeners about the Metacognitive States of Speakers. Journal of memory and language34(3), 383-398.

Brennan, S. E., & Schober, M. F. (2001). How listeners compensate for disfluencies in spontaneous speech. Journal of Memory and Language44(2), 274-296.

Corley, M., & Hartsuiker, R. J. (2003, July). Hesitation in speech can… um… help a listener understand. In Proceedings of the 25th Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 276-281).

Fox Tree, J. E., & Schrock, J. C. (1999). Discourse markers in spontaneous speech: Oh what a difference an oh makes. Journal of Memory and Language,40(2), 280-295.

Image credit: 123rf.com, used under license