Experts Say This Common Speaking Habit Could Offer Clues About Cognitive Decline

Reported by Women's Health Magazine.

Your "ums" and "uhs" might be doing more than filling awkward silences. New research published in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research — flagged by Women's Health Magazine — suggests that certain speech patterns, specifically disruptions in the natural flow of conversation, could serve as early indicators of cognitive decline and, potentially, dementia.

The study unfolded across two groups: 67 adults between ages 65 and 75, and 174 adults ages 18 to 90. Researchers showed participants detailed images, asked them to describe what they saw, and ran cognitive tests measuring executive function — memory, attention, planning, flexible thinking. Then AI analyzed hundreds of micro-elements in the recorded speech: pause length, filler word frequency, timing irregularities. The takeaway? "Speech disfluencies," or interruptions in the natural flow of speech, meaningfully predicted how participants scored on those cognitive assessments.

What Actually Signals a Problem

Before you spiral over every like and um: this is correlation, not diagnosis. "Filler words are extremely common in everyday speech. Nearly everyone uses them," says Daniel H. Daneshvar, MD, PhD, brain injury specialist at Mass General Brigham and chief of the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School. In real conversation, they're functional — a beat of space while your brain retrieves a thought. What matters is change. If someone who has always spoken fluidly suddenly struggles to complete sentences, loses words mid-thought, or can't follow conversations — especially alongside memory shifts — that's worth bringing to a doctor. Davide Cappon, PhD, neuropsychologist at Tufts Medical Center, notes that word-retrieval complaints are among the most common early flags in memory clinics: "I know what I want to say, but I can't get the word out."

If you want to cut filler words for any reason — professional, personal, or peace of mind — Dr. Daneshvar recommends slowing your pace, embracing silence between thoughts, speaking in shorter sentences, and occasionally recording yourself to catch patterns at transitions. Still, Cappon is clear: the occasional uh in a healthy person is meaningless. The more exciting implication here is clinical — that analyzing natural speech in real-world settings could become a low-friction way to track cognitive changes over time, long before other symptoms surface.

The brain leaves clues everywhere, and it turns out your voice might be one of the most honest ones — so the shift to listen for isn't a filler word, it's a pattern that wasn't there before.

Read the original at Women's Health Magazine.