This contribution looks at hesitation behaviour from various perspectives. Whenever speakers engage in spontaneous conversation, disfluencies, i. e., disruptions of the speech flow are bound to occur. These disfluencies are generally regarded as indications of verbal planning and/or monitoring of the speech signal. Phonetic manifestations vary — they range from pausing to inserted sounds of various sorts and false starts or repetitions.
Here, the focus is on hesitation markers, i. e., sounds which speakers produce as a function of the verbal planning process. These encompass filled pauses as well as initial and, predominantly, final lengthening. The principal question beyond fundamental frequency issues is to what extent these hesitation markers are speaker-specific. This question is of particular interest to neurolinguists, because if individual patterns were to be established, this would point to individual planning strategies. Results of a pilot study based on eight speakers will be presented. They demonstrate that there is reason to assume that hesitation patterns are individual. In this context, the topic is also of interest to forensic phoneticians, and the implications of our findings for forensic phonetics will be discussed.