Speech: Function, Task & Diseases

Speech is a basic function of human communication and distinguishes humans from any animal in this area. Human speech in this mature form does not occur in the animal kingdom and is a unique, highly accurate mode of communication among humans.

What is speech?

Speaking is the core of human communication. While gestures, facial expressions and body language are also very important depending on the situation, details are communicated through speech. Speaking describes the movement of the tongue and the use of teeth and lips to formulate sounds. Strung together, these words in turn form sentences and enable more vocal communication. Although many animals, especially mammals, also communicate with each other using sounds, this is not comparable with speech in humans. Speech always includes language. Every human being has at least one mother tongue and, depending on his or her talents, is capable of learning other languages. Language learning works best with children, the predisposition to speak and the corresponding developments already happen in the womb. The child can hear the speech sounds of the parents and develops an affinity for their languages – it learns them particularly easily in childhood. The ability to speak allowed humans a great advantage in their evolutionary-biological development, because by speaking they were able to communicate in a much more detailed and unambiguous way than natural predators or prey.

Function and task

Speech is the core of human communication. Although other, more primal elements also play a role, as is known from the animal kingdom, an important part runs only through speech. While gestures, facial expressions and body language are also very important, depending on the situation, details are communicated through speech. Since humans have a complex psyche in addition to their ability to speak, they can often express their processes only or mainly through speech. Important parts of daily life can also only be communicated through speech: Asking for help, distribution of tasks and especially the topics of modern civilization could not be conveyed by body language and co. alone. In addition to the ability to communicate oneself, language fulfills important functions in the sense of human togetherness. In the past, it played a central role in joint hunting and made it possible for people to hunt together more effectively and to reach agreements that their prey was not capable of. For the social fabric, speech fulfilled a similarly important task as in our modern communication. Speaking in one’s own language or dialect served over time as a demarcation from other communities, later from other communities and countries. Even today, one can observe in rural regions that a completely different sounding dialect is spoken in one village than in the neighboring village. This kind of demarcation through speech was not always, but in many cases fundamental for the formation of today’s countries. In contrast, learning a foreign language makes it possible to communicate with other cultures and, in the age of globalization, to open up the whole world to the individual as well as to network cultures with each other. Thus, speaking can be an excluding, but also an including element of the highly developed human culture. In the development of a child, speech represents a major milestone. While still in the womb, the child hears the speech and voice of the parents and will later be able to recognize both. Early after birth, the child’s understanding of the parents’ native language, in which they speak to their child, is consolidated. First syllables and words spoken by a child come from the mother tongue and are an imitation of the parents’ speech. However, it takes years before a child can formulate complete sentences.

Illnesses and complaints

The first irregularities in speech manifest themselves in children. These can learn words incorrectly, which often happens when they have been spoken to in baby language and then “re-educated”. Some children suffer a developmental disorder in the sense that they cannot speak like children of the same age. More rarely, they do not speak at all until a comparatively old age. A well-known case was Albert Einstein, whose language talent turned out to be above average afterwards.Nevertheless, speech disorders in children are to be taken seriously and must be observed. In most cases, the speech therapist can treat them well. Known disorders of speech are lisping or stuttering. In these cases, sounds are not formulated correctly or the psyche prevents the person’s speech ability from developing as it should. These speech disorders occur for the first time in childhood and can remain problematic for a lifetime, sometimes despite treatment by speech therapists and psychologists – especially people who stutter often have a long way to go to normalize their speech ability. Injuries to the parts of the body that are relevant for speech or congenital diseases and malpositions of these parts of the body lead to further speech disorders up to the complete inability to speak. Sometimes this also affects the sense of hearing, affected persons are then deaf and dumb. A particularly complicated case is the locked-in syndrome, in which not only the ability to speak has been lost, but also any form of external communication. Affected persons, often victims of serious accidents, have hardly any means left to make themselves understood.