Phone trees drive you mad? Just want to talk to an actual person? You aren’t alone – despite the fact that most customer service journeys begin with automated interactive voice response systems.
Saturday, April 2, is World Autism Day. Many individuals with extraordinary ability have been found to have autism. Researchers have now found that many child prodigies have an autistic relative.
Much has been written about vocal fry in recent years, with the focus on what it is, where it comes from and what it means … at least when it comes to females who fry. What’s really going on here?
What can a bunch of people grunting in a lab teach us about our capacity to create language systems? A lot about the gesture- or vocalization-based origins of language.
Abu Hamza has been sentenced to life in a US prison, after being found guilty of 11 charges of terrorism and kidnapping. The ruling was handed down as events unfolded in France, once again putting his…
In a playful rhetorical flourish at the Sydney Town Hall on Wednesday, Indigenous leader Noel Pearson monumentalised Gough Whitlam’s prime ministerial legacy, Monty Python-style: What did the Romans ever…
The recent torrent of complaints about the “inaudible dialogue” in the BBC’s adaptation of Daphne de Maurier’s Jamaica Inn have prompted a debate about actors’ speech. The cause of the problem was variously…
We live in a society that is fascinated by the brain – how it works, how it differs across individuals or changes over our lifetimes and how it makes us different to other species. And over the years…
The voice is an important tool which we use to communicate and express ourselves. But our voices convey so much more than the words we say. Just a few words can reveal clues about someone’s gender, age…
In the past few days, a great deal of media attention has been paid to Leanne Rowe, a Tasmanian woman who has lived eight years with a French accent she acquired after a car accident. This phenomenon is…
For the 1% of adults worldwide who stutter, the everyday task of picking up a phone, asking for directions, or ordering food in a restaurant can be incredibly difficult. Stuttering is even more common…