Sounds like h-nmm, hh-aaaah, hn-hn, unkay, nyeah, ummum, uuh, um-hm-uh-hm, um and uh-huh occur frequently in American English conversation but have thus far escaped systematic study. This article reports a study of both the forms and functions of such tokens in a corpus of American English conversations. These sounds appear not to be lexical, in that they are productively generated rather than finite in number, and in that the sound–meaning mapping is compositional rather than arbitrary. This implies that English bears within it a small specialized sub-language which follows different rules from the language as a whole. The functions supported by this sub-language complement those of main-channel English; they include low-overhead control of turn-taking, negotiation of agreement, signaling of recognition and comprehension, management of interpersonal relations such as control and affiliation, and the expression of emotion, attitude, and affect.
Meng, Yan, Péter Mihajlik, Dalai Mengke & Katalin Mády
2026. Robust Disfluency Labeling in Spontaneous Speech: Insights from Diverse Hungarian Corpora Including Atypical Speakers. In Text, Speech, and Dialogue [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 16029], ► pp. 289 ff.
Lee, Geonsun, Min Xia, Nels Numan, Xun Qian, David Li, Yanhe Chen, Achin Kulshrestha, Ishan Chatterjee, Yinda Zhang, Dinesh Manocha, David Kim & Ruofei Du
2025. Proceedings of the 38th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, ► pp. 1 ff.
Morozova, Natalia, Sabine Stoll & Adrian Bangerter
2025. Language‐Invariant Strategies of Navigating Transitions in Joint Activities: Forms and Functions of Coordination Markers. Cognitive Science 49:11
Nemesi, Attila L.
2025. Narrative cues to implicatures in classic novels: Explorations in Pride and Prejudice and The Age of Innocence. Journal of Pragmatics 249 ► pp. 193 ff.
Wang, Wei
2025. Phonetic Variants of Response Particles o and a in Mandarin Conversations: The Role of Nasalization and Glottalization in Interaction. East Asian Pragmatics
Wang, Xiaojiang & Yansheng Mao
2025. Backchannels used by Chinese doctors in online medical consultation. Journal of World Languages 11:2 ► pp. 434 ff.
Ward, Nigel G., Raul O. Gomez, Carlos A. Ortega & Georgina Bugarini
2025. Phonetic reduction is associated with positive assessment and other pragmatic functions. Speech Communication 175 ► pp. 103305 ff.
Weinberg, Tobias M, Claire O'Connor, Ricardo E. Gonzalez Penuela, Stephanie Valencia & Thijs Roumen
2025. Proceedings of the 27th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, ► pp. 1 ff.
2024. Content-free speech activity records: interviews with people with schizophrenia. Language Resources and Evaluation 58:3 ► pp. 925 ff.
Dingemanse, Mark
2024. Interjections at the Heart of Language. Annual Review of Linguistics 10:1 ► pp. 257 ff.
Ellisa Indriyani Putri Handayani & Agus Hari Wibowo
2024. Syntax Acquisition in Children: Developmental Patterns and Cognitive Processes. Jurnal Onoma: Pendidikan, Bahasa, dan Sastra 10:4 ► pp. 3926 ff.
Rebello, Keith, Stacy Marsella & Timothy Bickmore
2024. 2024 12th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction Workshops and Demos (ACIIW), ► pp. 314 ff.
Russell, Sam O’Connor, Iona Gessinger, Anna Krason, Gabriella Vigliocco & Naomi Harte
2024. What automatic speech recognition can and cannot do for conversational speech transcription. Research Methods in Applied Linguistics 3:3 ► pp. 100163 ff.
Tobin, Jimmy, Phillip Nelson, Bob MacDonald, Rus Heywood, Richard Cave, Katie Seaver, Antoine Desjardins, Pan-Pan Jiang & Jordan R. Green
2024. Automatic Speech Recognition of Conversational Speech in Individuals With Disordered Speech. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 67:11 ► pp. 4176 ff.
Türk, Olcay, Stefan Lazarov, Yu Wang, Hendrik Buschmeier, Angela Grimminger & Petra Wagner
2024. International Conference on Multimodel Interaction
, ► pp. 449 ff.
Wang, Kyra & Dorien Herremans
2024. TENCON 2024 - 2024 IEEE Region 10 Conference (TENCON), ► pp. 469 ff.
Wehrle, Simon, Martine Grice & Kai Vogeley
2024. Filled Pauses Produced by Autistic Adults Differ in Prosodic Realisation, but not Rate or Lexical Type. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 54:7 ► pp. 2513 ff.
Albert, Saul & Dirk vom Lehn
2023. Non-lexical vocalizations help novices learn joint embodied actions. Language & Communication 88 ► pp. 1 ff.
Ding, Hongwei & Yang Zhang
2023. Speech Prosody in Mental Disorders. Annual Review of Linguistics 9:1 ► pp. 335 ff.
Grahn, Inga-Lill, Camilla Lindholm & Martina Huhtamäki
2023. Accounting for changes in series of vocalisations – Professional vision in a gym-training session. Journal of Pragmatics 212 ► pp. 72 ff.
2023. Studying Multi-modal Human Robot Interaction Using a Mobile VR Simulation. In Human-Computer Interaction [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 14013], ► pp. 140 ff.
Yamamoto, Kenta, Koji Inoue & Tatsuya Kawahara
2023. Character expression for spoken dialogue systems with semi-supervised learning using Variational Auto-Encoder. Computer Speech & Language 79 ► pp. 101469 ff.
2022. Étudier la conversation pour mieux comprendre le langage. TIPA. Travaux interdisciplinaires sur la parole et le langage :38
Bordenave, Diane & Lorraine McCune
2021. Grunt Vocalizations in Children With Disabilities: Relationships With Assessed Cognition and Language. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 64:11 ► pp. 4138 ff.
McCune, Lorraine, Elizabeth M. Lennon & Anne Greenwood
2021. Gestures, grunts, and words: Development in a dynamic system. First Language 41:3 ► pp. 243 ff.
Shan, Yi
2021. Investigating the Interaction Between Prosody and Pragmatics Quantitatively: A Case Study of the Chinese Discourse Marker ni zhidao (“You Know”). Frontiers in Psychology 12
Shan, Yi
2023. Form (Prosody)-Meaning (Pragmatics) pairings of discourse markers: A case study of Nǐ zhīdào (‘You Know’) as a construction in Chinese media interviews. Language & Communication 93 ► pp. 136 ff.
Temer, Verónica González & Richard Ogden
2021. Non-convergent boundaries and action ascription in multimodal interaction. Open Linguistics 7:1 ► pp. 685 ff.
Funk, Markus, Vanessa Tobisch & Adam Emfield
2020. Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ► pp. 1 ff.
Kim, Jieun, Woochan Kim, Jungwoo Nam & Hayeon Song
2020. Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ► pp. 1 ff.
Braun, Michael, Nora Broy, Bastian Pfleging & Florian Alt
2017. Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, ► pp. 1 ff.
Braun, Michael, Nora Broy, Bastian Pfleging & Florian Alt
2019. Visualizing natural language interaction for conversational in-vehicle information systems to minimize driver distraction. Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces 13:2 ► pp. 71 ff.
Mao, Anmin
2017. Conceptuality and Context-Sensitivity of Emotive Interjections. Open Journal of Modern Linguistics 07:01 ► pp. 41 ff.
Volin, Jan, Lenka Weingartová & Oliver Niebuhr
2017. The Prosody of the Czech Discourse Marker ‘Jasně': An Analysis of Forms and Functions. Phonetica 73:3-4 ► pp. 314 ff.
Chlébowski, Aurélie
2016. The meaning of „nasal grunts” in the NECTE corpus. A preliminary perceptual investigation. Research in Language 14:1 ► pp. 43 ff.
Conde, Tatiana, Óscar F. Gonçalves & Ana P. Pinheiro
2016. The effects of stimulus complexity on the preattentive processing of self-generated and nonself voices: An ERP study. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience 16:1 ► pp. 106 ff.
CIENKI, ALAN
2015. Spoken language usage events. Language and Cognition 7:4 ► pp. 499 ff.
Koivisto, Aino
2015. Displaying Now-Understanding: The Finnish Change-of-State Tokenaa. Discourse Processes 52:2 ► pp. 111 ff.
Lee, Sinae
2015. Creaky voice as a phonational device marking parenthetical segments in talk. Journal of Sociolinguistics 19:3 ► pp. 275 ff.
Buschmeier, Hendrik & Stefan Kopp
2013. Co-constructing Grounded Symbols—Feedback and Incremental Adaptation in Human–Agent Dialogue. KI - Künstliche Intelligenz 27:2 ► pp. 137 ff.
Buschmeier, Hendrik & Stefan Kopp
2014. When to Elicit Feedback in Dialogue: Towards a Model Based on the Information Needs of Speakers. In Intelligent Virtual Agents [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 8637], ► pp. 71 ff.
Dingemanse, Mark, Francisco Torreira, N. J. Enfield & Johan J. Bolhuis
2013. Is “Huh?” a Universal Word? Conversational Infrastructure and the Convergent Evolution of Linguistic Items. PLoS ONE 8:11 ► pp. e78273 ff.
Fuchs, Susanne & Blake Rodgers
2013. Negative intraoral pressure in German: Evidence from an exploratory study. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 43:3 ► pp. 321 ff.
McCune, Lorraine
2013. A view from developmental psychology. In The Emergence of Phonology, ► pp. 441 ff.
McCune, Lorraine
2021. Laryngeal vocalizations: Grunts as a gateway to language?. Lingua 264 ► pp. 103161 ff.
2013. Semi-supervised methods for exploring the acoustics of simple productive feedback. Speech Communication 55:3 ► pp. 451 ff.
Ogden, Richard
2013. Clicks and percussives in English conversation. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 43:3 ► pp. 299 ff.
Benus, Stefan
2012. 2012 IEEE 3rd International Conference on Cognitive Infocommunications (CogInfoCom), ► pp. 77 ff.
Ward, Nigel G., Alejandro Vega & Timo Baumann
2012. Prosodic and temporal features for language modeling for dialog. Speech Communication 54:2 ► pp. 161 ff.
Winter, Bodo & Sven Grawunder
2012. The phonetic profile of Korean formal and informal speech registers. Journal of Phonetics 40:6 ► pp. 808 ff.
Barth-Weingarten, Dagmar
2011.
Double Sayings of German
JA
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Davis, Boyd
2011. Chapter 5. Intentional stance and Lucinda Greystone: Embodied memory in conversational reminiscence by a speaker with Alzheimer’s Disease. In Language, Body, and Health, ► pp. 75 ff.
Reidsma, Dennis, Iwan de Kok, Daniel Neiberg, Sathish Chandra Pammi, Bart van Straalen, Khiet Truong & Herwin van Welbergen
2011. Continuous interaction with a virtual human. Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces 4:2 ► pp. 97 ff.
Rusko, Milan & Štefan Beňuš
2011. Multimodal Multilingual Dictionary of Gestures: DiGest. In Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication and Enactment. The Processing Issues [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 6800], ► pp. 346 ff.
Wright, Melissa
2011. On clicks in English talk-in-interaction. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 41:2 ► pp. 207 ff.
Yuasa, Ikuko Patricia
2010. Creaky Voice: A New Feminine Voice Quality for Young Urban-Oriented Upwardly Mobile American Women?. American Speech 85:3 ► pp. 315 ff.
Norrick, Neal R.
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Norrick, Neal R.
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Pammi, Sathish & Marc Schroder
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Rusko, Milan & Jozef Juhár
2008. Towards Annotation of Nonverbal Vocal Gestures in Slovak. In Verbal and Nonverbal Features of Human-Human and Human-Machine Interaction [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 5042], ► pp. 255 ff.
Symonds, Dominic
2008. The Story of Oh: the aesthetics and rhetoric of a common vowel sound. Studies in Musical Theatre 2:3 ► pp. 245 ff.
[no author supplied]
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