Thee, uhh disfluency effect in preschoolers: A cue to discourse status
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Speech disfluencies, such as filled pauses (ummm, uhhh), are increasingly recognized as an informative element of the speech stream. Here, we examined whether 2- and 3-year-olds expected that the presence of filled pause would signal reference to objects that are new to a discourse. Children viewed pairs of familiar objects on a screen and heard a speaker refer to one of the objects twice in succession. Next, children heard a critical utterance and were asked to look and point at either the discourse-given (i.e., previously mentioned) or discourse-new (i.e., previously unmentioned) object using a fluent ('Look at the ball!') or disfluent ('Look at thee uh ball!') expression. The results indicated that 3-year-old children, but not 2-year-old children, initially expected the speaker to continue to refer to given information in the critical utterance. Upon hearing a filled pause, however, both 2- and 3-year-old children's looking patterns reflected increased looks to discourse-new objects, although the timing of the effect differed between the age groups. Together, these findings demonstrate that young children have an emerging understanding of the role of filled pauses in speech.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".