Anatomical Argumentative Essay

There is still no categorical answer as to why humans, and no other species, have speech, or why speech is the way it is. Several purely anatomical arguments have been put forward, but they have been shown to be false, biologically implausible, or of limited scope. This perspective paper supports the idea that evolutionary theories of speech could benefit from a focus on the cognitive mechanisms that make speech possible, for which antecedents in evolutionary history and brain correlates can be found. This type of approach is part of a very recent but rapidly growing trend that has already provided crucial insights on the nature of human speech by focusing on the biological bases of vocal learning. Here we contend that a general mechanism of attention, which manifests itself not only in the visual but also in the auditory

Various techniques and methodologies have been developed that allow us to know with great precision what goes on anatomically when human and non-human primates vocalize, from the lungs to the lips (Hardcastle et al., 1989; Fitch and Hauser, 1995; Fishman, 2003; Ghazanfar and Rendall, 2008). However, the question of why (only) humans have speech in the first place remains to be categorically answered. Different purely anatomical arguments have been put forward, such as the uniqueness of the descended human larynx (Fant, 1960; Lieberman and Crelin, 1971) or the loss of air sacs in humans (de Boer, 2012), but both arguments have been seriously questioned (Fitch and Reby, 2001; Nishimura et al., 2006; Littauer, 2012). In fact arguments of this type all share a general problem: they fail to grasp the mosaic nature of cognitive faculties that evolution has tinkered with. Modern evolutionary biology shows that complex traits—and surely speech or indeed language as a whole falls within that category—require complex and multi-dimensional explanations (West-Eberhard, 2003; Pigliucci and Müller,