Umm...

The article I read this week is about the difficulty of spoken language. The article centers around a book by journalist Michael Erard, which talks about speech disfluencies. As the article notes, Errard "says slip-ups happen because we're thinking way ahead of what comes out of our mouths. We make what another linguist, Rudolf Meringer, once called "forward errors." We want to say, "Grab that glass." But it comes out, "Glab that glass." That's because the brain is anticipating the "gllll" sound in the word "glass."
This is what usually leads to people stuttering or inserting 'uh' and 'umm' into their sentences. The brain is processing the sentences we want to say, but we complete the thought before we begin the sentence. A common stall employed in the US today is 'like.' I, personally, am so accustomed to using the word 'like' as a stall in sentences that I use 'como' to stall when I speak Spanish.
According to Wikipedia, "Speech disfluencies are any of various breaks, irregularities, or utterances that are often not consistent with any specific grammatical construction and occur within the flow of otherwise fluent speech." And they occur in multiple languages. "Americans use pauses such as "um" or "uh," the British say "er" or "erm", the French use something like "euh," the German say "äh" (pronounced eh or er), Japanese use "ahh", "ano", or "eto", and Hebrew and Spanish speakers use something like "ehhh", "como", and "este" in Mexican Spanish. In Mandarin "neige" & "jiege" are used while "Serbian" and "Croatian" speakers vocalize an "ovay". Thus, my translation of like is a common occurrence in Mexican speech disfluency.
My theory on why this happens because there are three process to formulating speech, and gaps between each of the processes causes delays in translation. First, our thoughts have an inception in 'mentalese,' the language of thought that preceeds actual spoken or consciously phrased language. These thoughts are quickly pieced together and translated into a sentence or into sentence parts in our heads. Then, the challenge is constructing this thought into a full, grammatically correct sentence and vocalizing it. The gap between mentalese and thought isn't visible because we can't really detect our language of thought, but the gap between forming an idea mentally and voicing that idea is clearly visible. Our mentalese only presents us with the main concepts necessary to the thought, but voicing that thought requires grammatical links between each piece of information we wish to express. This is where the challenge is presented: because we are thinking ahead to the completion of a thought or to the next thought in the process, we have difficulty connecting thoughts in a grammatically proper way, which causes these speech disfluencies.