I offer you some information on how we talk:
1. Human speech is simply a miracle. When speaking, we synchronously engage about 100 muscles of the chest, neck, jaws, tongue and lips. Each muscle is a bundle of hundreds and thousands of muscle fibers. More neurons are used to control this entire economy than when walking or running. One motor neuron can drive 2,000 muscle fibers in the gastrocnemius muscle. In contrast, the neurons that control the vocal cords control only one or two muscle fibers.
2. Each spoken word or simple phrase is characterized by one "pattern" of muscle movements. All the information you need to utter the phrase "Good afternoon!" located in the speech area of the brain. However, this is not a hard program. If, for example, you injured your tongue or underwent a dental operation, the program changes to pronounce this phrase as accurately as possible under the new conditions.
3. The common word "Hello" can mean many things. The tonality of the voice shows that the person is satisfied, bored, in a hurry, angry, sad, scared, angry. The intensity of the voice when pronouncing a phrase also matters - it can indicate irony, affection, support or ridicule. The meaning of this simple expression can change in a split second due to the complex coordination of all speech muscles.
4. A person can pronounce up to 14 sounds per second, while individual elements of the vocal apparatus - tongue, lips, jaws can move no more than two to four times per second.
5. Our ancestors had a primitive conversational system, including vocal, tactile and visual actions, similar to "communication" among animals. Speech appeared when a person got the opportunity to represent objects using symbols and a desire to share this knowledge with fellow tribesmen. The first symbolic language appeared, according to scientists, two and a half million years ago, when Homo Habilis (dexterous man) began to make stone tools. This activity played a key role in the development of human communication. The accuracy of speech intelligibility has gotten better and better, reaching almost the present level in Homo Sapiens 150,000 years ago. The mouth, nose, and pharynx have gradually evolved into a complex system where air is converted into vowels and consonants by the movement of the tongue and lips. Furthermore,the emergence of grammar and syntax was the result of an evolutionary process that began precisely with the simplest words and expressions.
6. Is speech an innate or acquired ability? Famous cases where children under the age of three were lost in the jungle and were found several years later showed that they are very poorly trained in human speech. Speech development requires early, ongoing communication with parents and peers, with up to three years of age being key in this process. It seems that the brain opens up at a certain age the ability to learn speech, which decreases significantly over time. Speech can only develop in society and only during brain growth.
7. Human speech is controlled by two centers of the brain (center of articulation, storage + grammar) located in the cortex of the left hemisphere of the brain. If we want to say something, it all starts in a zone called the “Wernicke zone”. Arousal from this zone is transferred to the Broca zone, in which grammar rules are applied to thoughts. The information from both of these zones is then used to control the muscles involved in speech. Also, these two zones are associated with visual areas in the brain, which gives us the ability to read, as well as auditory, which allows us to hear and understand what the interlocutor is saying, as well as respond to the topic of conversation. These zones also have a memory bank that stores a pattern of “firmware” for frequently used expressions.
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8. A sudden leap in the evolution of speech caused the appearance of language about 50 thousand years ago. In the modern world, there are more than 6,000 languages, which are believed to have descended from a single proto-language that arose in humans 50,000 years ago, when they began to form groups and settlements of 100-1000 people. There are now three families of languages - Indo-European, Austronesian and Bantu.
9. Many individuals of monkeys - chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans at different times were trained in basic human sign languages. In a number of experiments, they were trained to operate a computer using graphic symbols. Some of the monkeys were able to learn more than 1000 words (up to 40 words a day!), But their understanding of the words being learned is practically zero. In the end, everything depends on the ability of the brain.
10. There are three main hypotheses explaining the emergence of language:
a) The consumption by ancient people of mushrooms containing psilocybin (a hallucinogen) could lead to the activation of a new zone (Broca's Zone) in the human brain, especially its part that is responsible for articulation. Drawings from the Neolithic era in Tassili-n-Ajjer, Sahara, depict a shaman with full palms of mushrooms, which indirectly confirms this theory.
b) The evolutionary theory operates exclusively with speculative conclusions, claiming that speech was a consequence of evolution and made it possible for a person to survive, increase the population and fight predators more effectively.
c) A random mutation could also lead to the emergence of speech. Languages have a general structure that is inherent in a given species. In 2001, American researchers discovered a gene on chromosome 7, the absence of which led to significant difficulties in constructing phrases and understanding them, even in people who had high IQs. This shows that speech is not associated with intelligence as such, but is one of the genetic gains.