Listen carefully to a spoken conversation and you’ll notice that the speakers use a lot of little quasi-words—mm-hmm, um, huh? and the like—that don’t convey any information about the topic of the ...

Listen carefully to a spoken conversation and you’ll notice that the speakers use a lot of little quasi-words—mm-hmm, um, huh? and the like—that don’t convey any information about the topic of the ...

Listen carefully to a spoken conversation and you’ll notice that the speakers use a lot of little quasi-words — mm-hmm, um, huh? and the like — that don’t convey any information about the topic of the ...

Pain interjections can indeed be traced back to nonlinguistic vocalisations. We all know what words we might shout out when we stub a toe or touch something hot. For those of us who speak English, ...

From "ouch" to "aïe", human expressions of pain are strikingly similar worldwide, revealing something fundamental about how humans develop language. We're all familiar with the words we shout out when ...

But these little words may be much more important than that. A few linguists now think that far from being detritus, they may be crucial traffic signals to regulate the flow of conversation as well as ...