Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Speech disfluency such as filled pauses (um and uh) is commonly associated with negative speaker evaluation, yet findings from previous studies relied on scripted, lab-recorded speech. Here, in two experiments, we investigate how filled pauses influence social judgment and decision making using unscripted, multi-sentence discourse extracted from spontaneous speech corpora. We find that filled pauses led to lower perceived readiness and certainty, regardless of speaker expertise (Experiment 1). However, disfluent experts were judged as more careful than disfluent novices, indicating a context-dependent social benefit of disfluency. In a follow-up decision task (Experiment 2), listeners were less likely to choose to ask disfluent speakers again (as opposed to someone else), an effect mediated by perceived readiness but not certainty. By integrating spontaneous speech and speaker profiles, this study demonstrates the importance of socially situated accounts of language processing and the dynamic nature of social evaluation in communication.