Filled Pause
Research Center

Filled Pause
Research Center

Filled Pause
Research Center

Investigating 'um' and 'uh' and other hesitation phenomena

Investigating 'um' and 'uh' and other hesitation phenomena

Investigating 'um' and 'uh' and other hesitation phenomena

September 19th, 2015

What does "Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech" look like?

OK, this is purely for fun. After getting all the information pages set up for the history of the Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech workshop series (here), I decided to extract the text from the proceedings (unfortunately not all, because for some workshops I only have image scans) and then created a few Wordles™ based on the text. Here are a few results in slightly varying formats.

Here's one that distinguishes upper and lower case. Thus, "Speech" and "speech" are counted as separate words. [Note: click on the image to see full size.]

DiSS Wordle™ with round edges, ver. 1

The next one doesn't distinguish upper and lower case. Personally, I prefer this one to the above. I particularly like the way "disfluency", "spontaneous" and "speech" have lined up nicely in proximity of each other.

DiSS Wordle™ with round edges, ver. 2

Here's one that has a somewhat different boundary shape. I thought it looked cool because it seems to vaguely resemble a speech waveform. Perhaps someone with a bit more graphic artist expertise could create a composite of the two.

DiSS Wordle™ with straight edges, ver. 1

And finally, here's one that has more or less straight edges.

DiSS Wordle™ with straight edges, ver. 2

The Wordles on this page (and the larger ones they are linked to) are free to re-use without any attribution to me, though it would be nice if you acknowledge that they are based on the Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech workshop series.