Texas A&M Psychologist Studies Speech Patterns

The speech teacher who chastised the occasional uh and um was off base. These fillers, restarts and reformulations actually serve as windows into speech planning, according to a Texas A&M University psychology professor who studies the development of speech processing and production from infancy through adulthood.

These speech disfluencies (impairment of the ability to produce smooth, fluent speech) are actually helpful in constructing effective speech, says Heather Bortfeld, who has worked with other specialists in the field to learn more about this typically overlooked aspect of speech.

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