When we talk, we focus on the “content” words — the ones that convey information. But the tiny words that tie our sentences together have a lot to say about power and relationships.
NPR just ran this fun piece about James Pennebaker’s work on pronouns and filler words, and how they signal status and romantic interest. Turns out we can learn a lot from the words we never think about: pronouns like I or you, fillers like “uh” and “um,” and “verbal ticks” like “like.” Word nerds, if you want to read up on the topic, check out these papers:
Clark, H. H. & Fox Tree, Jean E. (2002). Using uh and um in spontaneous speaking. Cognition, 84, 73-111. — “Uh” signals a minor delay in your sentence, whereas “um” signals a more major delay.
Arnold, J. E., Tanenhaus, M. K., Altman, R. J., & Fagnano, M. (2004). The old and thee, uh, new. Psychological Science, 15(9), 578-582. — “Uh” signals that the speaker will probably be referencing something new in their sentence that hasn’t yet been mentioned in that conversation.
Fox Tree, J. E. (2006). Placing like in telling stories. Discourse Studies, 8(6), 749-770. — Using ‘like’ isn’t always vapid! An overview of the different ways ‘like’ is used in speech and what it signals.
Kidd, C., White, K.S., & Aslin, R.N. (2011). Toddlers use speech disfluencies to predict speakers’ referential intentions. Developmental Science, 14(4), 925–934. — Kids use people’s “um”s and “uh”s to learn new words.