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 ...

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 ...

An interdisciplinary team explored possible regularities in vocal emotional expressions by comparing expressive interjections, such as 'wow,' to nonlinguistic vocalizations, such as screams and cries, ...

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, ...

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 ...

Some parts of speech get lots of attention from language researchers. Nouns and verbs certainly do, and this seems appropriate, given that they refer to the objects and the actions that make up our ...

Kasia Pisanski receives funding from the National Centre for Scientific Research in France (CNRS 80-Prime grant 'EvoHumanVoice') and the National Research Agency in France (ANR grant 'SCREAM').