A new FPRC feature: Spotlight lists

The Filled Pause Research Center (FPRC) has recently been updated as explained here. One new feature of the site is something I'm calling Spotlight lists. These are several lists of recommended resources, each focusing on a specific theme: hence, reading lists, if you like.

At the moment, there are six reading lists available. They are accessible from the Bibliography page, or also from a special Spotlight entry page. The six lists are as follows.

• The CORE of filled pause research This represents a collection of papers that are either highly influential in their own right and are often cited, or which nicely summarize or establish certain things that are known about filled pauses. It's a good reading list for, say, new researchers to the field, or even experienced researchers who want a quick brush-up on the state of the art.
• The founding of hesitation phenomenology This is more for the sake of those who are curious about the earliest studies and thoughts about filled pauses. It's a neat walk down the nostalgia aisle. It also shows how in some respects, how far research has advanced, and yet in other respects, how little we know even now.
• Filled pauses in second language acquisition and pedagogy My own main interests in filled pause research falls mostly in this area, so I have to have a special list just for this.
• Filled pauses for non-academics This list is for those who may not want to wade through all the theoretically mumbo-jumbo and just get to the interesting bits about filled pauses.
• Acoustic phonetics of filled pauses This is another area of my interest in filled pauses and is very closely related to some of the hottest areas of research right now: That is, using acoustic information from filled pauses to determine other things like sentiment analysis, structural parsing, and so on.
• My greatest hits! And finally, a bit of shameless self-promotion: A list of some of my better works...

The motivation for these lists is something that has been on my mind for many years. As I have noted elsewhere, filled pause research is widely dispersed across academic fields and there really is no central place for academics to go to find out what's new. Indexing technology is gradually removing that barrier (with tools like Google Scholar), but it's a slow process. Furthermore, there's also no resource for, say, a new researcher to consult and get coherent guidance about the state of the art, current experimental techniques, theories, findings, shared datasets, and so on. These spotlight lists are intended to be a partial contribution towards that gap in hesitation phenomenology.

So, look under one of the spotlights that piques your interest and enjoy a bit of reading about ums and the like.