Much of the research investigating the impact of prosody on the perception of a speaker’s attitudes and characteristics has relied on attempting to elicit prosodic features in read speech, or artificial manipulation of recorded audio. Our novel method of implicitly controlling prosody in synthesized spontaneous speech provides a powerful tool for studying speech perception and can provide better insight into the interacting effects of prosodic features on perception while also paving the way for conversational systems which are more effectively able to engage in and respond to social behaviors. I will discuss the work presented at Interspeech 2022, which examined the combined impact of filled pause location, speech rate and f0 on the perception of speaker confidence. I will also discuss some more recent work on the perceptual impact of disfluencies, and goals and ideas for future work.