Geoffrey Beattie is Professor of Psychology at Edge Hill University. His research focusses primarily on embodied cognition/multi-modal communication and applied social psychology. He was Professor of Psychology at the University of Manchester from 1994 to 2012. He has presented a number of television series and given numerous keynote addresses to both academic and non-academic audiences.Andrew Ellis is Emeritus Professor at the University of York where he worked from 1988 until his retirement in 2014. During his time at York he served five years as Head of Department and four as Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research. His research was primarily concerned with the psychological and neural processes underlying word, object and face recognition.

• Preface, Introduction to the Classic Edition, The Nature of Communication, Channels of Human Communication, Kinesic Channels of Human Communication, The Language Channel, Linguistic Diversity: Babel and Beyond, Variation Within a Language, The Psycholinguistics of Speaking, The Stream of Behaviour: Co-ordinating Verbal and Non-verbal Channels, Conversation as Co-operative Interaction, Conversational Structure, Writing, Language Reception: Recognizing Spoken and Written Words, Language Comprehension and Memory, The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Language and Communication, The Development of Language and Communication

‘Thirty years ago Geoffrey Beattie and Andrew Ellis astutely pointed out that language takes place in conversation, where verbal messages always go hand in hand with non-verbal communication. Yet language was primarily studied in isolation. Since then some progress has been made, but there is still a long way to go. Students and more advanced researchers alike will benefit from reading this classic book, serving as an essential reminder that language's true function is to communicate.’, Suzanne Jongman, PhD. Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.