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A filled pause is a non-silent pause in an otherwise fluent speech, where instead of a silent pause there is a filler. The filler can be non-lexical or semiarticulate utterances such as huh, uh, erm, um, or hmm. Fillers may also include words such as well, so, I mean, and like, when used in ways that don't change the meaning of the surrounding speech.
This particular type of pause is one of several types of speech disfluencies, which also includes silent pauses, "false starts", phrases that are restarted or repeated, and repeated syllables.
References
- Kosmala, Loulou; Crible, Ludivine (March 2022). "The dual status of filled pauses: Evidence from genre, proficiency and co-occurrence". Language and Speech. 65 (1): 216–239. doi:10.1177/00238309211010862. ISSN 0023-8309. PMID 33977820.