Fact · Dictation
Readability studies cited by Lease and Johnson in 2006 found that fillers and speech repairs can be deleted from transcripts without compromising meaning.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
In the source's own words
“may be deleted from transcripts without compromising meaning”
Early Deletion of Fillers in Processing Conversational Speech, Matthew Lease and Mark Johnson, Proceedings of NAACL HLT 2006, Short Papers, 2006, Abstract.
Open the original- What it measures
- The authors cite earlier readability studies, and their own paper tests filler deletion for automatic parsing of conversational speech.
- What it does not show
- The claim comes from a review of earlier studies of transcripts, not from a study of dictated drafts. Conversational fillers in a transcript are not the same as the filler words a speaker drops while dictating, and the paper does not measure whether readers notice the deletion.
Source
Cited on
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