Researchers found that words that signal problems with understanding are similar across languages
Friday, November 8, 2013 - 18:01
in Psychology & Sociology
A word like 'Huh?'—used when one has not caught what someone just said—appears to be universal: it is found to have very similar form and function in languages across the globe. This is one of the findings of a major cross-linguistic study by researchers Mark Dingemanse, Francisco Torreira and Nick Enfield, at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE.