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 to one end of a phone conversation, and you’ll probably hear a rattle of ah’s, um’s and mm-hm’s ... the humble huh?, a sort of voiced question mark slipped in when you don ...

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 ...