Spontaneous communication, both verbal and written, includes a wide variety of phenomena generally not found in prepared communication. These include restarted ideas, ums and uhs, words like you know and like, and prosodic phenomena such as uptalk. Spontaneous communication also includes other behaviors whose productions might vary across spontaneous and rehearsed settings, such as facial expressions, gestures, laughter, backchannels, and quotation devices. In this talk, I will present some of the research findings coming out of my lab that provide information about why these phenomena are produced and how they are used.

Jean Fox Tree is Professor of Psychology at UC Santa Cruz.