Definition of "disfluency" []

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

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• "It is an example of the positive effects of what scientists call "disfluency"."
• "Sen. Clinton, who is often criticized as over-rehearsed, blitzed through a question about nuclear energy at 207 words per minute without a disfluency."
• "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."