Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Lack of fluency in speech; any of various breaks, irregularities, and non-lexical vocables that occur within otherwise fluent speech.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun lack of skillfulness in speaking or writing

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

dis- +‎ fluency

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Examples

  • It is an example of the positive effects of what scientists call "disfluency".

    BBC News - Home 2010

  • Sen. Clinton, who is often criticized as over-rehearsed, blitzed through a question about nuclear energy at 207 words per minute without a disfluency.

    Talk Is Cheap in Politics, 2007

  • To me, native speaker equivalence means that, apart from disfluency, you only make "native speaker mistakes."

    languagehat.com: NATIVE SPEAKER. 2004

  • Mark Liberman of Language Log has a very suggestive entry about the disfluency of the Wolof elite, as described in Judith Irvine's "Wolof Noun Classification: The Social Setting of Divergent Change" (Language in Society, 7: 37-64 (1978)), at least as he remembers it:...upwardly mobile men among the Wolof nobility cultivate inarticulateness as a sign of status.

    languagehat.com: ON NOT SPEAKING WELL. 2004

  • Keeping with the theme of the research, they titled their paper, "Fortune favors the bold and the italicized: Effects of disfluency on educational outcomes."

    Yahoo! News: Business - Opinion 2011

  • We'd found that disfluency led people to think harder about things.

    BBC News - Home 2010

  • Shorn of the Teleprompter, he not only runs the risk of revealing a disfluency that could rival (or even exceed?) that of his reviled predecessor George Bush - he may reveal who he truly is, an angry man with a profoundly radical agenda for America.

    The Blog from the Core 2009

  •  A Word About Fluency -  We all go through a stage of disfluency.

    Recently Uploaded Slideshows 2008

  • disfluency, can actually help young children learn language.

    NPR Topics: News 2011

  • I documented lots of Kevin Madden's goofs, gaffs, pratfalls, moments of disfluency, attempts to botch even the simplest of messages, and naive and transparent lies on my "who is Willard Milton Romney" blog. "

    race42008.com 2008

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