Uhh…. A cross-linguistic analysis of, erm, vowel quality in, uh, filled pauses

There is a considerable amount of research on filled pauses already, concentrated mostly on their functions, production, perception, and what sociolinguistic information they give us about the speaker. My research is on the vowel quality of the filler itself, specifically whether there are significant cross-linguistic trends. This study compares vowel quality in realisations of filled pauses in English and Finnish, and finds that there are significant differences between the two languages. This study is intended as a starting point for research into the effect of first language on other suprasegmental phonetic phenomena. A 2004 study by Gick, Wilson, Koch, and Cook at the University of British Columbia established that a speaker’s first language affects the tongue’s inter- utterance resting position; my interest is in what we can further generalise about phonetic phenomena from this and other first-language effects.