PART 3 READING PASSAGE 3

Read the text below and answer Questions 27-40.

SPEECH DYSFLUENCY AND POPULAR FILLERS

A speech dysfluency is any of various breaks, irregularities, or sound-filled pauses that we make when we are speaking, which are commonly known as fillers. These include words and sentences that are not finished, repeated phrases or syllables, instances of speakers correcting their own mistakes as they speak, and “words” such as ‘huh’, ‘uh’, ‘erm’, ‘um’, ‘hmm’, ‘err’, ‘like’, ‘you know’, and ‘well’.

Fillers are parts of speech that are not generally recognized as meaningful, and they include speech problems such as stuttering (repeating the first consonant of some words). Fillers are normally avoided on television and in films, but they occur quite regularly in everyday conversation, sometimes making up more than 20% of “words” in speech. However, they can also be used as a pause for thought.

Research in linguistics has shown that fillers change across cultures and that even different English-speaking nations use different fillers. For example, Americans use pauses such as ‘um’ or ’em’, whereas the British say ‘uh’ or ‘eh’. Spanish speakers say ‘ehhh’, and in Latin America (where they also speak Spanish) but not Spain, ‘este’ is used (normally meaning ‘this’).

Recent linguistic research has suggested that the use of ‘uh’ and ‘um’ in English is connected to the speaker’s mental and emotional state. For example, while pausing to say ‘uh’ or ‘um’, the brain may be planning the use of future words. According to the University of Pennsylvania linguist Mark Liberman, ‘um’ generally comes before a longer or more important pause than ‘uh’. At least, that’s what he used to think.

Liberman has discovered that as Americans get older, they use ‘uh’ more than ‘um’, and that men use ‘uh’ more than women, no matter their age. But the opposite is true of ‘um’. The young say ‘um’ more often than the old, and women say ‘um’ more often than men at every age. This was an unexpected result because scientists used to think that fillers had more to do with the amount of time a speaker pauses for, rather than with who the speaker is.

Liberman mentioned his findings to fellow linguists in the Netherlands, and this encouraged the group to look for a pattern outside American English. They studied British and Scottish English, German, Danish, Dutch, and Norwegian, and found that women and younger people said ‘um’ more than ‘uh’ in those languages as well.

Their conclusion is that it is simply a case of language change in progress and that women and younger people are leading the change. And there is nothing strange about this. Women and young people are typically the pioneers of most language changes. What is strange, however, is that ‘um’ is replacing ‘uh’ across at least two continents and five Germanic languages. Now this really is a mystery.

The University of Edinburgh sociolinguist Josef Fruehwald may have an answer. In his view, ‘um’ and ‘uh’ are pretty much equivalent. The fact that young people and women prefer it is not significant. This often happens in language when there are two options. People start using one more often until the other is no longer an option. It’s just one of those things.

As to how such a trend might have gone from one language to another, there is a simple explanation according to Fruehwald. English is probably influencing the other languages. We all know that in many countries languages are constantly borrowing words and expressions from English into their own language, so why not borrow fillers too? Of course, we don’t know for a fact whether that’s actually what’s happening with ‘um’, but it is a likely story.

Questions 27-34

Do the following statements agree with the information given in the text?

For questions 27-34, write

TRUE.	if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE.	if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN.	If there is no information on this