Jumping in too quickly with ‘Oh yes, that happened to me’ can end up saturating conversation and make your friend feel they were never heard in the first place.
Taylor Swift’s fans were not happy when it was rumoured she had started dating infamous bad boy Matt Healy.
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Aerosols are the tiny particles of liquid and material that float around in our environment. When they come from an infected person, they may be a significant source of coronavirus transmission.
The change in CDC guidance comes in response to new research on how the new coronavirus can spread.
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The CDC now recommends that everyone wear a face covering when they go into a public place. But there’s confusion about why and if this protects the wearer, people around them or both.
The experience that babies get from eavesdropping on their mother’s conversations in utero helps their brain tune into the language that they will learn to speak once they are born.
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It can be hard to understand a non-native speaker of your own language. But conversation is a two-way street and linguists are figuring out how native listeners can improve their half of the interaction.
No longer do we need to talk with shop assistants, receptionists, bus drivers or even coworkers, we simply engage with a screen to communicate whatever it is we want to say.
One of the ways we work out what proto-language might have been like is by looking at languages which have developed from nothing in recent times. One of the best examples is Nicaraguan Sign Language.
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In the space of a few short years, deaf Nicaraguan school children created their own language. This example may give us a clue about how spoken language developed over thousands of years.
The internet has revolutionised communication, but voice calls are declining in some demographics. And that means we may be losing out on a powerful part of what connects us to each other.