The papers brought together in this volume illustrate how spoken corpora (be they native or learner corpora) can provide insights into various aspects of errors and disfluencies such as pauses and discourse markers. They show, among others, that such phenomena can be influenced by factors like gender, age or genre, and that they can correlate with, e.g., informativeness and syntactic complexity. Crucially, they also demonstrate that items which are often dismissed as mere disfluencies can fulfil important functions and thus play an essential role in the management of spoken discourse. (Originally published in International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 16:2 (2011))