'Er' cautions listeners to stay on side'Ums' and 'uhs' contain meaning, say US psychologists.
28 May 2002
JOHN WHITFIELD
 | | Mind the gap: speakers warn of forthcoming problems
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Um ... there're these psychologists, right? And they've, uh, come up with, like, the idea that 'um' and 'uh' are really words, which speakers, um ... use to highlight their conversational problems. Ok? 'Uh' and 'um' send information to listeners just like proper words, say Herbert Clark of Stanford University, California, and his colleague Jean Fox Tree at the University of California, Santa Cruz. They analysed transcripts of conversations between academics and from phone conversations and answering-machine messages. English speakers lob in 'um' before a long pause and 'uh' in front of a brief hiatus, the analysis revealed. People even create compounds such as 'thee-um' or 'and-uh', says Clark, showing that speakers know that there is going to be a problem after the word even before they begin it. The researchers believe that speech contains two streams of information, which speakers blend and listeners unravel. One strand contains the meaning. With the other - asides such as 'um', 'uh', 'like' and 'y'know?' - speakers comment on how smoothly their train of thought is running. "Remarkably, we do these things more or less simultaneously during conversation," says Clark. 'Uh' and 'um' are commonly thought just to fill a pause or prevent interruptions. But this doesn't explain how people use them, says Clark: "You see them in monologues as much as dialogues, and people also use them in Internet chatrooms," he points out. Speech researcher Robin Lickley agrees that 'uh' and 'um' should be treated as genuine words. "People tend to think of these things as sloppy, whereas they're perfectly normal," says Lickley, who works at Queen Margaret University College in Edinburgh. He also likes the idea that speech contains parallel strands. But he doubts that 'uh' and 'um' really perform the function that Clark and Fox Tree claim for them. "I don't think they're inserted to help the listener - about half the time people don't notice them," he says. "They just keep the flow of speech going." Other studies have shown, however, that listeners process speech more quickly with the 'ums' and 'uhs' left in than when they are taken out. And beginning an answer with 'um' is interpreted as showing greater uncertainty than a silent pause of the same length. Pause forethought Different languages have their own gap-signalling words. The uncertain Spaniard says 'em' and the Swede 'hmm', whereas the Japanese have a raft of options, including 'anoo' and 'jaa'. A common feature is that the word's sound is easy to stretch out, and so adapt to the length of the pause for thought. Public speakers learn to suppress umming and erring, hiding moments of uncertainty. For example, there's not a single 'um' or 'uh' in any of the recorded inaugural addresses made by US presidents between 1940 and 1996. So has studying 'uhs' and 'ums' made Clark more conscious of his own hesitations? "If you aren't careful it's a killer, but I try and keep it from becoming one," he says. | 
