Why Only Humans Have Language
Thursday 12th January 2023, 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM (London Time)
Language and speech, in the forms we have them, are unique to humans.
Why should that be?
I will suggest that they evolved in our lineage to bond the very large groups that we evolved, and probably only dates back around 200,000 years or so.
Although we do use it to say things about ourselves (a kind of advertising function), in fact we gain most of our information on this aspect of who we are from non-verbal cues.
Rather, the main function of speech seems to be to allow us to tell stories – everything from jokes to history to fiction.
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Professor Robin Dunbar
Robin Dunbar MA PhD DSc(Hon) FRAI FBA is Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Oxford, an Emeritus Fellow of Magdalen College, and an elected...
Attend this course for as little as £22 as part of the Voice Professional Training CPD Award Scheme.
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This six-week course is an opportunity to learn about both Received Pronunciation and Standard Southern British English. Rather than a course in learning how to speak RP/SSBE (there are many brilliant available courses for this already), this course is about learning how to coach it.
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Dr. Alyssa Becker
Shaped by the popular music of its time, musical theatre blends storytelling with an ever-evolving range of vocal styles—from classical legit singing to jazz, hip-hop, and powerhouse belting. Despite its importance, much of what we understand about vibrato comes from laboratory-based studies that strip singing of its musical, stylistic, and performance context. Join Dr Alyssa Becker as she connects current research with real-world pedagogy, revealing how elite musical theatre performers strategically use vibrato to shape style and storytelling, and showing how these insights can be applied in the voice studio to train stylistic flexibility and control!