Introduction

Phrases such as uh, like, well, and er, as well as many other linguistic fillers have become extremely commonplace Fillers are part of an even larger group of linguistic flaws known as speech disfluencies Fillers are perceived as a decrease in the quality of a speakers rhetoric A study in 2001 calculated disfluency rates according to different factors such as age, as well as disfluency rates among different situations Plagued by likes and ums by teenagers across the country, we must ponder the question, how high are these disfluency rates? Do ethnicity and gender affect the rate of disfluencies? Have they increased since 2001? Does todays youth choke up, become nervous, and use fillers more often when talking to authoritative figures, like teachers, compared to when speaking with other peers around their age?

Hypothesis
The frequency of linguistic fillers, restarts, and repeats will be greater in an adolescent to authoritative figure conversation than in an adolescent to peer conversation.

Filler Restart

Repeat

Uh, um, like, well, Look over actually, whats your name again? Look over over there.

Background
Along with fillers, other disfluencies include restarts and repeats These disfluencies are unlikely to be intentionally produced and should not be considered as conventional words (Corley and Stewart) It has been estimated that approximately 6% of words spoken are or are part of a disfluency (Foxtree) Disfluencies, especially fillers, have been hypothesized to occur for many different reasons An analysis of different factors on the rate of fillers in speech, performed by Bortfield, Leon, Bloom, Schober, and Brennan, showed that fillers were more common when discussing abstract ideas, supporting the use of a filler for planning speech Disfluency rates were also slightly higher in middle-aged and older speakers than in children (Bortfield) Men had a higher rate of fillers in a 1996 study (Shriberg)