Descriptive discourse: topic familiarity and disfluencies Sandra Merlo a,* , Letı ´cia Lessa Mansur b a Laboratory of Phonetics, Institute of Language Studies, Campinas State University (UNICAMP), R. Se ´rgio Buarque de Holanda, 571, LAFAPE, Campinas, SP, Brazil, 13084-971 b Laboratory of Neurolinguistics, Speech-Language Pathology Course, University of Sa ˜o Paulo (USP), Sa ˜o Paula, SP, Brazil Received 24 April 2002; received in revised form 16 March 2004; accepted 16 March 2004 Abstract This investigation was undertaken to address questions about topic familiarity and disfluencies during oral descriptive discourse of adult speakers. Participants expressed more attributes when the topic was familiar than when it was unfamiliar. Fillers and lexical pauses were the most frequent disfluencies. The mean duration of each hesitation pause was 776 ms. The sum of hesitation pause durations was well correlated with the number of occurrences. Repetitions, hesitation pauses, and prolongations were shown to have the same role, which was distinct from the role of fillers. The type of analysis conducted in this investigation may be useful in distinguishing between normal and disordered speech production. Learning outcomes: The reader will obtain information about the differences between the number of propositions in familiar and unfamiliar oral descriptions. The reader will also become aware of the distribution of disfluencies in discourse categories employed by the participants in this investigation. # 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Descriptive discourse; Topic familiarity; Fluency; Disfluency The importance of studying descriptive discourse is that its use is very common in everyday life: when one wants to explain, teach, classify, or file, a descriptive discourse can be used (Hamon, 1981, cited by Marquesi, 1995). Descriptive discourse can be defined as an analysis of characteristics of a concrete referent (Greimas & Courte ´s, 1979). When describing a person, an object, a means of transportation, a place or any other matter, one Journal of Communication Disorders 37 (2004) 489–503 * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ55-11-3714-3060. E-mail address: sgmerlo@yahoo.com.br (S. Merlo). 0021-9924/$ – see front matter # 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jcomdis.2004.03.002