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Record W4412843449 · doi:10.1075/prag.23060.gad

Listener and reader perceptions of <i>um</i> and <i>uh</i>

2025· article· en· W4412843449 on OpenAlexaff
Timothy Gadanidis

Bibliographic record

VenuePragmatics Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicLanguage, Discourse, Communication Strategies
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPsychologyPerceptionCognitive psychologyNeuroscience

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Corpus-based research on the “filled pauses” um and uh has shown that um is gaining frequency relative to uh , with um used more frequently by women and younger people. There has been some speculation that the rise of um is linked to a new discourse function or meaning, but this has not yet been fully substantiated. This paper approaches the problem from a perceptual angle, reporting the results of two experiments investigating participants’ judgments of the indexicalities of the “filled pauses” um and uh in two media: instant messaging and speech. Participants’ qualitative and quantitative responses suggest that readers and listeners associate the use of um with hesitancy, femininity, politeness, and thoughtfulness, but that uh is primarily associated just with hesitancy. I argue that these indexicalities may be linked to the ongoing change, with um indexing a potentially more desirable type of hesitation than uh .

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.625
Threshold uncertainty score0.594

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.012
GPT teacher head0.259
Teacher spread0.248 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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