By Emilio Sánchez
English Major at UPNFM- Honduras
Studies related to human language have shown that men speak an average of 7,000 words per day while women speak about 20,000 words per day. Yes, there is a huge difference in the amount of talking that men and women do but still, there is a commonality that we both share. We both are able to respond to questions, make comments, requests, offers or other language functions in an immeasurable length of time. This is, we can respond and produce language as quickly as our brain processes the ideas that we want to express. But the question is: How can we make such fast connections in our brain that we do not need to take a pause after each word we say when we speak? Or, how can we transform ideas into words?
We are not the first ones in asking these sorts of questions. Actually, many professionals related to language and Psychology have wondered what is behind the marvelous spark that produces speech. An American psycholinguist called David McNeill tries to explain how speech is first conceptualized in our minds. He claims that there are two different but parallel ways of thought behind the speech production; these are syntactic thinking and imagistic thinking. The first one is like the spark that bursts into the sequence of words that we use when we talk. The second one refers to the conception of the gestures that we naturally and inevitably use when we are having a conversation.
Where does speech come from?
4 Mind Explorer/ October, 2013