Fact · Dictation
Clark and Fox Tree proposed that speakers use uh and um to announce a delay in speaking: a minor one they expect after uh, and a major one after um.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
In the source's own words
“speakers use uh and um to announce that they are initiating what they expect to be a minor (uh), or major (um), delay in speaking”
Using uh and um in spontaneous speaking, Herbert H. Clark and Jean E. Fox Tree, Cognition, 2002, Abstract.
Open the original (DOI 10.1016/S0010-0277(02)00017-3)- What it measures
- The authors examined spontaneous speech from several large corpora of conversation and treated uh and um as conventional English words that announce what comes next, not as noise.
- What it does not show
- This is the authors' proposal, supported by corpus evidence. It describes what speakers do in conversation, not what dictation software should do with these sounds.