LINGUIST’S POPULAR TED-ED LESSON INSPIRED BY COLLABORATIVE WORK

A paused YouTube video with an American flag sketch and two blue blob characters with "UH" and "UM" written next to them.

A screen shot from Lorenzo García-Amaya’s popular TED-Ed Lesson.


Congratulations to Lorenzo García-Amaya, Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, and collaborators in the Speech Production Lab for an impressive outreach milestone. Dr. García-Amaya was the script writer for an engaging TED-Ed Lesson that has now surpassed more than two million views online. Released in 2021, the video is entitled “Why do we, like, hesitate when we, um, speak?”. It has been translated into numerous languages such as Spanish, Italian, and Arabic.

The lesson asks: are our words like “uh” and “um” in speaking just habits we can’t break or is there more to them? “Linguists call these filled pauses, which are a kind of hesitation phenomenon,” the lesson states. “And these seemingly insignificant interruptions are actually quite meaningful in spoken communication.”

García-Amaya was a faculty team member with the Collaboratory’s Project Grant From Africa to Patagonia: Voices of Displacement. His TED-Ed script was partly inspired by teamwork initiated in the Humanities Collaboratory, notes PI Nick Henriksen—including an article García-Amaya co-authored on Afrikaans-Spanish filled pauses with Research Assistant Sean Lang.