Conversation fillers are sounds like uh or um that commonly occur in spontaneous conversational speech. When these sounds are noticed, they are commonly perceived negatively in that speakers are considered unprepared, nervous, or less confident. This paper reviews several recent studies dealing with linguistic, psycholinguistic, and neurolinguistic aspects of conversational fillers and suggests that, despite generally negative perception, conversational fillers play an important role in interpersonal spoken interactions and function positively in facilitating communication. For example, they signal intonational or syntactic structure, cue given vs. new entities in discourse, increase attention, improve retention of words following them in memory, or signal metacognitive states of the speaker to the listener. These functions bring potential of using conversational fillers in various applications that are based on interactive speech and voice processing. Further studies of fillers in languages like Slovak may improve our understanding of the complexities of human spoken interactions.
