Disfluencies in Public and Private Speech.

The public and private samples did not use the same speakers, so speaker-specific disfluency patterns may have affected the comparison. The annotation of silent pauses and lengthening depends on auditory perception and the annotator's judgment about whether the pause is disfluent. The functions and contextual explanations are the researchers' interpretations, so they involve subjectivity. The public samples were formal events and the private samples included many monologs, so the contexts are not evenly matched across all speech settings. The data are only native Slovenian speech, so caution is needed before applying the patterns to other languages or cultures. The study did not test a treatment, so it cannot show that a treatment works.

The research was funded by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency through several named projects and infrastructure programmes. The article does not report a commercial sponsor or a commercial conflict of interest.

Do not read the higher overall disfluency association with private speech as a sign of poorer speech. The study compared different speakers in different contexts, and filled pauses, unrepaired pronunciations and blocks were more associated with public speech.