Other animals possess basic systems for perceiving and generating sounds that enable them to communicate with each other. These systems may have been in place before the appearance of language. Are the vocalizations of animals related to human spoken language? According to Chomsky, the most fundamental difference between human language and vocalization of animals is that human language is infinitely creative, free of stimulus control and unlimited in its capacity to express ideas, whereas animal communication consists of a fixed number of signals, each of which is associated on a one-to-one basis with an external stimulus. This view is disputed that those who have observed chimps creating novel utterances.

As a consequence of recent discoveries, there are two competing views on the origins of language.

• Selectionist view
  Darwinian natural selection is used to explain a large proportion of evolutionary changes in species, including the origin of grammar, and even all of language.
• Exaptationist* view
  Parts of language were exapted from cognitive structures that our pre-human ancestors used for food gathering, rule learning, tool making, hunting, etc.

*An exaptation is a biological adaptation where the biological function currently performed by the adaptation was not the function performed while the adaptation evolved under earlier pressures of natural selection

Dr. Derek Bickerton of the University of Hawai'i argues that humans may have been speaking a precursor of language (words without grammar) some two million years ago. He suggests that language developed some 120,000 year ago when humans left the forest and started to forage and hunt in the savanna. To communicate to others what they found, they needed to develop context-free vocal symbols, for instance, a general word for lion. By context-free is meant that the same word could be used in different contexts, such as "The lion is big," or "The lion is hiding in the bushes", or "Beware of the lion". In this way, early hominids could have taken the first steps toward language. Language also provided a means to engage in communal activities, such as hunting, and to transmit knowledge, such as tool-making. Ability to communicate through language created an advantage that spread quickly through the population.

Click here to listen to a discussion about the origins of language by three scholars.

Wernicke's area

Broca's area

Language areas in the human brain

• About 95% of right-handers and 75% of left handed people do most of their language processing on the left side of their brain.
• The area most associated with language comprehension is Wernicke's area. Without this area, people can hear the words or read the letters, but have difficulty attributing meaning to them.
• Broca's area is most associated with speech production. When this area is damaged, people may have trouble producing grammatically-correct sentences.