Pausers and fillers seem to be more common now than the words they are pausing between. And there are lots of them.
Google says: Scholars have narrowed down the causes of filler words into three categories: divided attention, infrequent words, and nervousness. Each of these activities can cause an increase in verbal disfluency, thus resulting in filler words interrupting speech.
Now Bing, in its "NEW" version looks like this below. On the psychology of filler words, it says this: Filler words also appear in speech when an individual uses words that he or she uses infrequently. In the International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, Dockrell et al. state that infrequent words are a major cause of the appearance of filler words. Infrequent words are simply words that we do not use on a daily basis and are therefore somewhat foreign to our mental dictionaries. Filler words, then, appear when someone is having difficulty processing a word. This means that a person’s brain cannot locate a word, which will cause him or her to pause, frequently throwing um in its place until the word, or a synonymous word, is found and used in speech.
There is lots of advice saying it's not the end of the world to use these words, and at the same time there are lots of tips of avoid them. There isn't anything on whether they are more prevalent today. My theory is that we live at hyper speed, so a slight pause is an invitation for an interruption to take over the conversation. This seems to revolutionize the speed and rhythm of speech. Who knows how we actually spoke 500 years ago? |