Young Men Talk Like Old Women
13th May 2023
OK, here’s my little result. I took a quick look at demographic variation in the frequency of the filled pauses conventionally written as “uh” and “um”. For technical reasons that I won’t go into here, I used the frequency of the definite article “the” as the basis for comparison. Thus I selected a group of speakers (e.g. men aged 60-69), counted how often they were transcribed as saying “uh”, and to normalize that count (since the number of people in each category was different) I divided by the number of times the same speakers were transcribed as saying “the”.