Many scientists, though, think that our cultural fixation with stamping out what they call “disfluencies” is deeply misguided. Saying um is no character flaw, but an organic feature of speech; far from distracting listeners, there’s evidence that it focuses their attention in ways that enhance comprehension.
Disfluencies arise mainly because of the time pressures inherent in speaking. Speakers don’t pre-plan an entire sentence and then mentally press “play” to begin unspooling it. If they did, they’d probably need to pause for several seconds between each sentence as they assembled it, and it’s doubtful that they could hold a long, complex sentence in working memory. Instead, speakers talk and think at the same time, launching into speech with only a vague sense of how the sentence will unfold, taking it on faith that by the time they’ve finished uttering the earlier portions of the sentence, they’ll have worked out exactly what to say in the later portions. Mostly, the timing works out, but occasionally it takes longer than expected to find the right phrase. Saying “um” is the speaker’s way of signaling that processing is ongoing, the verbal equivalent of a computer’s spinning circle. People sometimes have more disfluencies while speaking in public, ironically, because they are trying hard not to misspeak. [...]
Experiments with ums or uhs spliced in or out of speech show that when words are preceded by disfluencies, listeners recognize them faster and remember them more accurately. In some cases, disfluencies allow listeners to make useful predictions about what they’re about to hear. In one study, for example, listeners correctly inferred that speakers’ stumbles meant that they were describing complicated conglomerations of shapes rather than to simple single shapes. [...]
If disfluencies appear to generally help communication more than they hinder it, why are they so stigmatized? Writer and linguist Michael Erard argues in his book Um… that historically, public speakers have been blissfully unconcerned with disinfecting their speech of disfluencies until about the 20th Century—possibly because neither hearers nor speakers consciously noticed them until it became possible to record and replay spoken language in all its circuitous and halting glory. The aversion to disfluencies may well have arisen from speakers’ horror at hearing their own recorded voices. Erard suggests that the modern repugnance for disfluencies is less an assessment of a person’s speech than it is a “deeper judgment about how much control he should have over his self-presentation and his identity.” In truth, disfluencies appear to distract mainly those who have been trained to revile them.
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