The Brain Blogger – Viatcheslav Wlassoff, PhD 
The use of sound is one of the most common methods of communication both in the animal kingdom and between humans. Animals use vocalization and calls to communicate and share critical information about food, dangers and individual intentions. Vocalization in the animal kingdom, as far as we know, relies on relatively small vocabulary of sounds, and a newborn animal is ready to communicate with adult individuals almost immediately. In contrast, human speech is a very complex process and therefore needs intensive postnatal learning to be used effectively. Furthermore, to be effective the learning phase should happen very early in life and it assumes a normally functioning hearing and brain systems. In fact, the integrity of the hearing system seems to be very important to the language learning process. Children who lose hearing capacity will suffer a decline in spoken language because they cannot hear themselves and lose an important auditory feedback. Nowadays, scientists and doctors are discovering the important brain zones involved in the processing of language information. Those zones are reassembled in a number of a language networks including the Broca, the Wernicke, the middle temporal, the inferior parietal and the angular gyrus. The variety of such brain zones clearly shows that the language processing is a very complex task. (more)