page_title: Origin of speech
section_title: Festal origins
hierarchical_section_title: Origin of speech / Speculative scenarios / Twentieth century speculations / Festal origins
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Illustration des Spiegelneuronennetzwerkes von Jan Brascamp
context_page_description: The origin of speech refers to the more general problem of the origin of language in the context of the physiological development of the human speech organs such as the tongue, lips and vocal organs used to produce phonological units in all human languages.
context_section_description: The essay "The festal origin of human speech", though published in the late nineteenth century, made little impact until the American philosopher Susanne Langer re-discovered and publicised it in 1941. 
  "In the early history of articulate sounds they could make no meaning themselves, but they preserved and got intimately associated with the peculiar feelings and perceptions that came most prominently into the minds of the festal players during their excitement."
  — J. Donovan, 1891. The Festal Origin of Human Speech.
  The theory sets out from the observation that primate vocal sounds are above all emotionally expressive. The emotions aroused are socially contagious. Because of this, an extended bout of screams, hoots or barks will tend to express not just the feelings of this or that individual but the mutually contagious ups and downs of everyone within earshot.
  Turning to the ancestors of Homo sapiens, the "festal origin" theory suggests that in the "play-excitement" preceding or following a communal hunt or other group activity, everyone might have combined their voices in a comparable way, emphasizing their mood of togetherness with such noises as rhythmic drumming and hand-clapping. Variably pitched voices would have formed conventional patterns, such that choral singing became an integral part of communal celebration.
  Although this was not yet speech, according to Langer, it developed the vocal capacities from which speech would later derive. There would be conventional modes of ululating, clapping or dancing appropriate to different festive occasions, each so intimately associated with that kind of occasion that it would tend to collectively uphold and embody the concept of it. Anyone hearing a snatch of sound from such a song would recall the associated occasion and mood. A melodic, rhythmic sequence of syllables conventionally associated with a certain type of celebration would become, in effect, its vocal mark. On that basis, certain familiar sound sequences would become "symbolic".
  In support of all this, Langer cites ethnographic reports of tribal songs consisting entirely of "rhythmic nonsense syllables". She concedes that an English equivalent such as "hey-nonny-nonny", although perhaps suggestive of certain feelings or ideas, is neither noun, verb, adjective, nor any other syntactical part of speech. So long as articulate sound served only in the capacity of "hey nonny-nonny", "hallelujah" or "alack-a-day", it cannot yet have been speech. For that to arise, according to Langer, it was necessary for such sequences to be emitted increasingly out of context — outside the total situation that gave rise to them. Extending a set of associations from one cognitive context to another, completely different one, is the secret of metaphor. Langer invokes an early version of what is nowadays termed "grammaticalization" theory to show how, from, such a point of departure, syntactically complex speech might progressively have arisen.
  Langer acknowledges Emile Durkheim as having proposed a strikingly similar theory back in 1912. For recent thinking along broadly similar lines, see Steven Brown on "musilanguage", Chris Knight on "ritual" and "play", Jerome Lewis on "mimicry", Steven Mithen on "Hmmmmm" Bruce Richman on "nonsense syllables" and Alison Wray on "holistic protolanguage".
  Mirror neuron hypothesis (MSH) and the Motor Theory of Speech Perception
  The mirror neuron hypothesis, based on a phenomenon discovered in 2008 by Rizzolatti and Fabbri, supports the motor theory of speech perception. The motor theory of speech perception was proposed in 1967 by Liberman, who believed that the motor system and language systems were closely interlinked. This would result in a more streamlined process of generating speech; both the cognition and speech formulation could occur simultaneously. Essentially, it is wasteful to have a speech decoding and speech encoding process independent of each other. This hypothesis was further supported by the discovery of motor neurons. Rizzolatti and Fabbri found that there were specific neurons 
caption: Mirror Neurons, originally found in the macaque monkey, are neurons which are activated in both the action-performer and action-observer. This is a proposed mechanism in humans.
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