{"id":5569,"date":"2013-05-02T15:28:49","date_gmt":"2013-05-02T20:28:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/college.unc.edu\/?p=5569"},"modified":"2024-07-02T14:22:50","modified_gmt":"2024-07-02T14:22:50","slug":"arnold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/?p=5569","title":{"rendered":"How our conversational “mistakes” may help us get our point across"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Jennifer<\/a>
Jennifer Arnold (photo by Susan Hardy)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cMommy,\u201d Jennifer Arnold\u2019s three-year-old asked, \u201cwhat does \u2018um\u2019\u00a0mean?\u201d<\/p>\n

Without knowing it, Arnold\u2019s daughter had hit on a question that Arnold, a UNC psychologist and linguist, was studying in the lab. In our everyday speech, Arnold says, we\u2019re surprisingly inarticulate. We stumble over words, repeat ourselves, run words together so fast that they\u2019re barely intelligible out of context. Amazingly, we manage to get our point across most of the time\u00a0anyway.<\/p>\n

Most of us think of our speech mistakes as meaningless at best, Arnold says\u2014or, at worst, as bad communication. But, as she and her lab found, our conversational missteps sometimes actually help our listeners get what we\u2019re\u00a0saying.<\/p>\n

According to studies, disfluency makes up about 6 percent of our everyday speech. This happens for many different reasons, Arnold says. We might be having a hard time deciding what to say or how to say it. We might be distracted. \u201cIn order to show that we haven\u2019t just checked out,\u201d she says, \u201cwe\u2019ll throw in a word like \u2018um\u2019 or\u00a0\u2018uh.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Studies she\u2019s done have shown that we tend to be disfluent when we\u2019re introducing new information into a conversation. It makes sense: it\u2019s easier for the brain to stay on one track than to jump to a new one. The same is true for the person listening. Out of all the things that might be mentioned in conversation, the thing most likely to come up is whatever\u2019s already being talked about. \u201cYour mind,\u201d Arnold says, \u201cexpects things to be like they were in the\u00a0past.\u201d<\/p>\n

So we don\u2019t wait until someone\u2019s done speaking to figure out what they\u2019re saying. Before the person we\u2019re talking to gets all the words out, we start guessing how the sentence will end. Arnold thought that one small thing\u2014disfluency\u2014might override our instinct to guess in favor of old\u00a0information.<\/p>\n

In the lab, Arnold\u2019s team fitted subjects with eye-tracking devices \u00a0and explained that their task was to move objects around the screen with a mouse. A recorded voice gave them an instruction, such as: \u201cPut the grapes below the\u00a0candle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Easy enough. \u201cNow put the camel below the salt shaker.\u201d Listeners who heard this perfectly grammatical sentence took longer to glance at the camel than did listeners who heard a slightly disfluent sentence: \u201cNow put theee, uh\u2026 camel below the salt shaker.\u201d The insertion of \u201ctheee, uh\u201d before \u201ccamel\u201d seemed to signal to the listener that candles were out and a new subject was\u00a0in.<\/p>\n

Arnold\u2019s lab also showed that hearing \u201ctheee, uh\u201d made listeners look more quickly at an object that was difficult to name (such as a weird squiggle) than at an object with a known name, such as an ice-cream\u00a0cone.<\/p>\n

Apparently our brains use disfluency as a cue to signal new or unusual information. Why is this a big deal? For one thing, \u201cit overturns the brain\u2019s extremely powerful bias to expect things to be like they were in the past,\u201d Arnold says. If we want to get our point across quickly, we might do better leaving our speech mistakes in than trying to get them all\u00a0out.<\/p>\n

Everyone\u2019s disfluent, Arnold says. It\u2019s a normal part of everyday speech, rather than a signal that communication is breaking down. \u201cWhen you\u2019re having a hard time saying something, you slow down,\u201d she says. \u201cYou pause. That can help the listener, if you\u2019re explaining something\u00a0difficult.\u201d<\/p>\n

Arnold herself talks a mile a minute, but she slows down\u2014seemingly unconsciously\u2014to explain why she studies such minute aspects of language production. \u201cMy interest in language is as a window into the human mind,\u201d she says. \u201cI often say to my students that we want to understand this so well that we could build a robot that processes language the way people\u00a0do.<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course, we\u2019re not even close to that yet. But we want to understand the human mind on that level of\u00a0detail.\u201d<\/p>\n

So does Arnold\u2019s daughter get to throw in as many \u201cuhs\u201d and \u201cums\u201d as she wants? \u201cOne time she was trying to tell me a story and she just kept saying, \u2018Um\u2026 um\u2026 um\u2026\u2019 over and over,\u201d Arnold laughs. \u201cI told her, \u2018Okay, stop and think about what you\u2019re going to say, and then say\u00a0it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

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Jennifer Arnold is an associate professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences. Her disfluency research began and was conducted with colleagues at the University of\u00a0Rochester.<\/strong><\/p>\n

[Story by Susan Hardy, Endeavors <\/a>magazine]<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

UNC psychologist and linguist Jennifer Arnold found that our conversational missteps, like saying “uh” and “um,” sometimes actually help our listeners get what we’re saying.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":5570,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center 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