Fluentehesitatie

Fluentehesitatie is a term used in linguistics to describe brief hesitations that occur during fluent speech. It refers to short pauses or fillers that interrupt otherwise smooth delivery and are not signs of a speech disorder.

In contrast to clinical stuttering, fluentehesitatie involves momentary planning or discourse-management markers rather than repetitions, prolongations, or automatic blocks. It typically includes filled pauses such as um or uh, and short silences, and may occur at clause boundaries or while retrieving difficult words.

Usage and function of fluentehesitatie can include signaling turn-taking, helping the speaker plan upcoming content, softening assertions, or indicating uncertainty. Its frequency and duration can vary with language, culture, topic complexity, and cognitive load, and it is common in informal speech, public speaking, and second-language production.

Measurement and research on fluentehesitatie often use corpus analysis and acoustic measurement, tracking rates of filled pauses, average pause length, and distribution across discourse structures. It is distinguished from more severe dysfluencies by the absence of repeated or prolonged segments and by the overall fluency of surrounding speech.

Etymology and scope: The term is Dutch in origin, combining fluente (fluency) and hesitatie (hesitation). In cross-linguistic work, similar phenomena are described as filled pauses or planning pauses. The notion is not universally standardized, and some scholars prefer more neutral or broader terms such as filled pause or discourse marker.

See also: filled pause, speech disfluency, stuttering, discourse marker.