A
speech disfluency, also spelled
speech dysfluency, is any of various breaks, irregularities (within the
English language, similar speech dysfluency occurs in different forms in other languages), or
non-lexical vocables that occurs within the flow of otherwise fluent speech. These include
false starts, i.e. words and sentences that are cut off mid-utterance, phrases that are restarted or repeated and repeated syllables,
fillers i.e. grunts or non-lexical utterances such as "huh", "uh", "erm", "um", "well" and "like", and
repaired utterances, i.e. instances of speakers correcting their own slips of the tongue or mispronunciations (before anyone else gets a chance to). "Huh" is claimed to be a
universal syllable.