I study the collateral signals people produce in talking on the fly. These are signals beyond the conventional words uttered, and include such phenomena as discourse markers (words like you know, I mean, and like), fillers (um and uh), repetitions and repairs (such as "she says well that's- we have to pay our- pay our own"), gestures, and prosodic information (such as the pauses between words, prolongation of words, and the melodic pattern of an utterance, including uptalk). My theoretical and empirical work demonstrates that these phenomena are not only worthy of notice, they are of vital importance to successful communication in everyday conversation.