Horizon - Why do we talk?

• Speech and language define us from other animals
• Children learn to speak with minimal effort
• Despite the amount of research done and being done how we learn is still a mystery
• Dr Deb Roy - Speech home project. Found parents simplify language (convergence) to match child's simple language and as the child's language becomes more complex so does the caregivers.
• By the age of 5 years old a child knows around 5000 words
• For humans the voice box is low within the throat and on animals it quite high. This was suggested to be the reason we could speak but they could not, however, it was found that animals actually drop their voice box with they make noises. This shows that the different positions of the voice box does not determine whether you talk or not.
• Dr Kathy Price - Highlighting the key areas in the brain that are associated with language (nature)
• Babies respond to their mothers before anyone else. They pick up sound within the womb
• Noam Chomsky - Language acquisition device (lad). There is a blueprint for language but we need to be exposed early on 
• It was noticed that in a family with a speech problem there was a problem with chromosome 7
• Also in an unrelated child it was found that a part of the chromosome was missing which was affecting the child's speech ability.