Dysfluency

An interruption in the normal flow of speech, including repetitions of sounds, syllables, or words ("b-b-because"), prolongations of sounds ("ssssnake"), blocks (silent pauses where speech is temporarily stopped), and interjections ("um", "uh"). While occasional dysfluencies are common in typical speech, frequent or severe dysfluencies characterize stuttering and other fluency disorders. Dysfluencies pose significant challenges for speech recognition systems, which are typically trained on fluent speech and may misinterpret repetitions as separate words, cut off speech during blocks, or insert filler words into transcriptions.