Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Mark Dingemanse: My name’s Mark Dingemanse, and I am an associate professor at the Center for Language Studies at Radboud ...

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 ...

Oops! I spilled some coffee. Hmm… Let me think about it. Woohoo! That’s great news. Let’s celebrate. To the untrained ear, sounds like “oops” “hmm” and ...

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 ...

Finn accepts a challenge by Feifei to speak using only interjections. Does he manage to do this? Listen to the programme to find out. The sounds are followed by facial expressions Feifei: Hello, Finn.

There are an estimated 7,000 languages spoken worldwide, each offering unique ways to express human emotion. But do certain emotions show regularities in their vocal expression across languages? In ...

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 ...

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 ...