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 ...

Human exclamations of pain are similar across the world, new study reveals 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, it’s ...

One night last week, I explained to a youthful hotel desk clerk that my family and I were interested in playing cards up in our room, then asked her if the hotel had a deck. She made this sound:. Then ...

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.

Interjections primarily express emotion — often in a way that doesn’t seem very sophisticated. But Anne Curzan, an English professor at the University of Michigan and regular contributor to the Lingua ...

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 ...