When people talk face to face, they don’t rely on words alone. They move their hands, raise their eyebrows, or nod to help express what they mean. These gestures often carry meaning and help listeners ...

When people are having a conversation, they rapidly take turns speaking and sometimes even interrupt. Now, researchers who have collected the largest ever dataset of chimpanzee “conversations” have ...

When people are talking, they can start to unconsciously mirror each other, for instance, in the words they use, their sentence structures and even hand gestures. This tendency to mirror others can ...

In face-to-face conversations, speakers use hand movements to signal meaning. But do listeners actually use these gestures to predict what someone might say next? In a study using virtual avatars, ...

When people use hand gestures that visually represent what they’re saying, listeners see them as more clear, competent and persuasive. That’s the key finding from my new research published in the ...

If you liked this story, share it with other people. Across human languages and cultures, conversing involves listening to the speaker and rapidly responding to them. This phenomenon, known as ...