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You know when you're searching for a word, or trying to say something more nicely than you actually mean it, or trying to make up your mind after you've already started speaking? Whether you reach for an "um" or an "uh" in those situations might depend on whether you're male or female. Our verbal pauses actually speak volumes: "Like," as eighth-grade English teachers will tell you, makes the speaker sound young or ditzy; "sort of" smacks of uncertainty. But according to the linguist Mark Liberman, who works at the University of Pennsylvania and blogs at Language Log, even a difference as subtle as the one between "um" and "uh" provides clues about the speaker's gender, language skills, and even life experience.

Umm ... (Asked by Tom Lanier of Austin, Texas) Not everyone says "um", "er" or "ah" when they hesitate while speaking. It depends upon the language. For example, speakers of Mandarin Chinese often say"zhege" which roughly translates as "this". In English we say "um", "er", "ah", or other vocalisations for reasons that linguists are not entirely sure about.

"Our main conclusion is that delays in word onset facilitate word recognition, and that such facilitation is independent of the type of delay. ... Our findings support the perhaps counterintuitive conclusion that fillers like um can sometimes help (rather than hinder) listeners to identify spoken words. But critically, the data show that the same is true for silent pauses and pauses filled with artificially generated tones. "

In spoken language, especially in conversations, people are prone to using filler words or - as linguists call them - discourse particles. By inserting these semantically and syntactically neutral words in an utterance, they allow for a speaker to pause while collecting their thoughts while preserving the position of speaker, a coveted social role.

Learn how to remove filler words from formal speeches to present with confidence.

"New research is showing that speakers shouldn't discard those "ums" and "ahs" and other speech fillers if they want to be understood by listeners. ... "One finding that we had is that if you're listening to a story or a speech, people remember the content better if the person says 'uh' and 'um' in it than if the story is completely fluent," Watson said. ... "This is speculation, but if the speaker doesn't know what they're saying very well, you pay attention more because you think you need to work harder to get it. One thing that disfluencies do is buy speakers more time. They are a signal to the person listening that I need more time."" Link to study: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749596X11000234

"They are making the inference - not consciously - that when someone has difficulty making a word they are most likely referring to an object that is rare," says Aslin.

This language talks about the use of filler words in sentences and speech. Used limitedly, there are nothing wrong with filler words, but they may take away from how confident and put together you appear. It also covers hedge words, and how they make your sentences less impactful.

This article took another take on filler words and expanded on how filler words can actually be useful if used in an intentional way.

This study explores the use of filler words through the lens of gender. Filler words are more commonly associated with women due to the "valley-girl" stereotype. However, these researchers found that, while filler words were used more frequently by women in the past, men use tend to use more filler words than women present-day. This paper discusses how the shift in gender roles and social dynamics between the genders contributes to speech patters.

This study from the University of Pennsylvania explores whether or not Asian-Americans have a certain "sound" to their speaking that distinguishes them from their White counterparts. White and Asian-American audio samples were curated for a test group to listen to in order to guess their races. On average, White and Asian-American participants in the study were around 65% accurate in their guesses, suggesting more success than random guessing. Some individual participants had accuracy as high as 85% or 90%. Some audio samples yielded guesses that were accurate upwards of 90% of the time. Asian-American participants were often more accurate in their guesses, but less able to express how they knew. White participants described the "upspeak" often used as a "lack of assertiveness." They also identified "increased pauses between words" and "jerkier speech". They also noted that Asian Americans used more "filler material" in their sentences like "um," "uh," or "like." I thought that was interesting because in Japanese, similar filler words like あのう and ええと are used. In Indonesian, we often hum as a filler, which I found to be different than typical English speakers' hums, and that I as a bilingual person have started to do when speaking English as well.

This article discusses flawed association of filler words with misogyny and credibility/confidence of women.

What our speech reveals about us

""Interviewers who spoke moderately fast, at a rate of about 3.5 words per second, were much more successful at getting people to agree than either interviewers who talked very fast or very slowly," said Jose Benki... variation in pitch could be helpful for some interviewers but for others, too much pitch variation sounds artificial, like people are trying too hard. ... "People who pause too much are seen as disfluent. But it was interesting that even the most disfluent interviewers had higher success rates than those who were perfectly fluent.""

mom in many languages

For decades, scientists thought perhaps smell was a diminished human sense and less valuable than other senses - like our glorious eyesight. "In the West, people came to this conclusion [through] the fact that we don't seem to have a good ability to talk about smells," says Asifa Majid, a professor of language and cultural cognition at Radboud University in the Netherlands. But Majid found that isn't universally true. Certain language speakers can name odors as easily as English speakers name colors, and the key difference may be how they live. Majid worked with speakers of four different languages: English and three from the Malay Peninsula. Two of these languages, Semaq Beri and Jahai, are spoken by hunter-gatherer groups. The other one, Semelai, is spoken by farmers. In order to test the ability of these language speakers to classify odors, Majid and her colleagues gave asked them to smell pen-shaped contraptions each filled with a different scent like leather, orange, garlic or fish - and then asked them to identify the smell. She also asked the participants to identify colors using different color chips. The farmer Semelai, like English speakers, found colors relatively easy to name and agreed with one another that the red chips were, indeed, red. When it came to identifying odors, the Semelai failed as miserably as the English speakers on the same tests. But both hunter-gatherer groups were much better at naming smells than the Semelai. In fact, they were just as good at identifying smells as colors. "That says something about the hunter-gatherer lifestyle," Majid says. There's a scarcity of English words that objectively describe odors, Majid says. Given that, readers of this article - written in English - may wonder how it's possible to describe a smell without leaning on other senses like taste (words like "sweet" or "sour") or emotional words like "gross." In English, most of our attempts to describe smells come from individual sources. You