Spontaneities

Over the years, I've posted several times about the problematic word (and concept) disfluency — there's a too-long list at the end of "Spontaneous (dis)fluency" (8/27/2025). Among other ideas, I've suggested using the term interpolations (see this 2019 post for example). But as far as I can tell, this suggestion has had no impact on other people's usage.

So here's another try: How about making a list of the ways in which fluent spontaneous speech is not like fluent reading, and calling them all spontaneities?

Normal spontaneous speech is full of

• Filled pauses (uh, um)
• Filler words (you know, I mean, so, like… )
• Silent pauses (and pseudo-pauses) not in a reading-style relation to message structure
• Rapid initial repetitions (in- in- in the- the, …)
• False starts (“that was my= uh the last time”…)
• Non-speech vocalizations (laughs, sighs, tongue clicks, … )

To enhance readability, transcriptions generally omit most or all of such things. And to study spontaneities, we need easy-to-use notations that can be easily counted. In my own practice, I use

• __ for silent pauses in talking-typical places (e.g. between an article and the following adjective or noun) optionally with duration in milliseconds, e.g. _856_
• final – for rapid initial repetition
• final = for false starts
• {laugh}, {sigh}, etc. for non-speech vocalizations, or {NSV} if there isn't a standard term

(It would be better to use a structure-oriented rather than string-oriented notation, but that would be much harder to use in typed transcripts…)

When normal spontaneous speech is accurately transcribed, 10-30% of all tokens typically represent such events. You can check the transcriptions in posts like this one or this one, among many others — though in those examples I've omitted the _N_ notations, e.g.

had lot of influence on how I think about- _534_ about history

My belief is that spontaneities are best seen as part of prosody,�along with timing and phrasing, emphasis, voice quality, intonation – all the stuff that is left out of written text, but is a normal and inevitable part of spontaneous speech.

Of course, there are genuine memory failures, like forgetting what you were going to say, or blanking on a word; and genuine “slips of the tongue”, like exchanges, substitutions, anticipations, perseverations of words, syllables, segments, features; and genuine problems at the level of articulation and sound. But I'll argue that most spontaneities are not like that, or at least not entirely like that. And even genuine blanks and slips should not be seen as a deviation from perfect elocution, but as part of the normal process of talking. Furthermore, our perception of spontaneity-full talking is the normal mode of speech perception.

In fact, if one of your friends started talking at you as if they were reading, your reaction would be "Who are you and what have you done with my friend?"

One reason that it's hard to evaluate these claims is that most (or at least too many) linguists and psychologists study only reading, not talking. In particular, almost 100% of empirical studies on speech production and perception use read speech.

Someday, that ought to change.