A primary difference between spontaneous speech and read speech concerns the use of false starts, where a speaker interrupts the flow of speech to restart his utterance. The acoustic aspects of such restarts in a widely-used speech database were examined here. Identifying the type of restart in such cases could improve the performance of an automatic speech recognizer, by eliminating from consideration some hypotheses based on spectral analysis. Results are given here which could allow simple identification of most restarts and their type.