The article attempts to test the hypothesis about the ability of vocalizations as a very common hesitation phenomenon in oral discourse to act as a method of covert manipulation. Saying e-e or m-m, the speaker seems to warn the interlocutor that he has not finished his remark yet, but is simply thinking about its continuation. It was assumed that such a signal would be correctly perceived by the interlocutor, who would not seize the speaking queue, but would wait until the speaker passed this queue to him. However, the analysis of corpus material did not confirm this hypothesis. Three types of situations were found in the considered contexts: (1) the interlocutor does not respond to the “warning” vocalization and enters into the conversation, interrupting the speaker; (2) the interlocutor perceives the signal to wait, but the speaker refuses to continue for some reason - and then the interlocutor enters into the conversation without interruption; (3) the interlocutor perceives vocalization as a request for help and prompts the speaker to the right word according to the “backchannel” principle. The expected function of vocalization as a manipulative unit turned out to be unrealized in all cases. The study was carried out on the material of the oral subcorpus (OS) of the National Corpus of the Russian Language and the corpus of the Russian language of everyday communication "One Speech Day" (ORD).