• Question: Why do you think that humans can speak but other animals cannot

    Asked by weste038 to Suzanne, Kapila, Claire, Joanna, Renata on 17 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by knigl034, vanessa200134, flipper123, tomskc.
    • Photo: Suzanne Harvey

      Suzanne Harvey answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      Great question, and one that came up in a psychology exam during my degree! There are a few ideas about this, but the answer is that no one knows for sure.

      In the past, people have taught gorillas 2000 words in sign language, and a bonobo has been trained to use grammar, saying things like “I want the ball that’s over there”. But, he can ONLY do this by pointing to symbols, not by using sounds, or speaking. So some primates can understand communication but not speak! One idea is that there is a gene called FOXP2, which is different in humans than other animals. This gene controls the physical side of speech – how we move our mouths to make words. Other apes don’t have this ability like we do.

      If we put the human FOXP2 gene into a chimp, would he be able to speak? That’s a fascinating philosophical question, I would guess not because language is involved in so many brain processes that a lot of other genes will be involved, but who knows! It’s questions like this that got me into evolutionary science in the first place…

Comments

  • Photo: Joanna

    Joanna commented on :

    The evolution of language is actually one of the things I study. There are a lot of theories, but none are certain yet. One theory is that language itself evolves — that there were “sentences” first based on long calls (calls monkeys & birds make to let others that are far away know where they are) & that people were smart enough & had good enough memory that we could learn the significance of changes in parts of the long calls, and these became words & we got language that way. I think this theory might be true. All apes have long lives (so time to learn) & rely on culture (stuff learned from other apes), but humans are the only ape that can imitate other sounds (like birds), so maybe that is why we are the only ones that had this happen.