Different in degree or kind:our speech has pitch control (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, June 28, 2018, 18:30 (2340 days ago) @ David Turell

It is built into the human brain. No other primate brain has this:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-06-music-speech-linked-brain-area.html

"We humans are the only primates that can flexibly control the pitch of our voices. This melodic control is not just important for our singing abilities: Fluctuating pitch also conveys critical information during speech—including the speaker's mood, words of emphasis, or whether a sentence is a statement or a question. Some tonal languages, like Mandarin Chinese, even use pitch to give different meanings to otherwise identical words.

"Now, new research by UC San Francisco scientists reveals what area of the human brain controls the vocal folds of the larynx, or voice box, to let us control the pitch of our speech. Insights into pitch control could pave the way for advanced brain prosthetics that could allow people who can't speak to express themselves in a naturalistic way.

"Chang's lab recently showed how one part of the brain controls the lip, tongue, and throat muscles to produce the fluid combinations of vowels and consonants that make up the principal phonetic sounds of speech. Their new study shows that a different region of the brain independently governs the "music" of speech.

"When you push air through the larynx, you can control how quickly your vocal cords vibrate based on the tension you place on them. Much like tightening a guitar string, increasing tension in those folds by flexing your larynx muscles causes them to vibrate faster, and results in sound or speech with a different pitch. But only a few species are capable of learning to flexibly control vocal pitch. "Control of the larynx is a key step in the evolution of spoken language," said Dichter.

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"They found that activation of neurons in one brain area, called the dorsal laryngeal motor cortex, was linked with quick changes in pitch, such as when different words are emphasized in a sentence. The more active that area of the cortex was, the higher the speaker's pitch on individual words. This was true both during speech as well as when the patients were singing a simple melody. Neurons in a nearby brain area activated when a speaker changed the overall pitch of her or his voice, as we sometimes do when we speak in a higher pitch to pets or children.

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"What's more, the researchers found that dorsal laryngeal motor cortex also responds to pitch when the patients silently listened to their own speech played back. According to Dichter, this brain area does not appear to be used in the same way in other primates, and the finding that it takes part in perceiving as well as producing pitch changes might yield clues about how our brains allow us to mimic one another's speech, and to intentionally change the pitch of our voice."

Comment: I've described how complex the voice mechanism is in humans, involving tongue, lips, throat, laryngeal muscles. The only interpretation [possible is when humans arrived all of this was present to be activated when humans learned how to do it. The big brain allowed all sorts of new mental activity, including that initiated by the soul.