Over the years, many debates have risen on the question of the origins of language have given rise to many debates over the years. The scientists are divided into several groups.
Some support the vocal theories of the origins of human language, speculating that meaningful communication arose from the development of onomatopoeia, from involuntary exclamations, from the use of arbitrary symbolic sounds developed from the cries of primates, or imitating with their mouths the gestures of an existing language.
Another school of thought developed the gestural theory to explain the origins of language. According to them, the climatic and environmental changes that lead to a transition to walking on two legs could also free our upper limbs for gestural communication.
A trio of researchers from the University of Wisconsin and the University of California has conducted a study that comes to the conclusion that perhaps humans did not start using language as a result of using only hand gestures as scientists have theorized before. Rick Dale, Marcus Perlman and Gary Lupyan propose another hypothesis instead. In their paper published in Royal Society Open Science. In their vision, human language may have been a result of both gesturing and noise-making.
The question how we humans first began speaking to one another is still to be answered with certitude. But scientists tend to agree that this was a gradual process happening simultaneous across different groups of the human population. Individuals probably used various signals to communicate, including body language, eye contact. But now a new study came to suggest that noises might have played a role as well. Noises could have been meant to convey some degree of meaning.
The research trip conducted a study on a group of volunteer participants asked to make noises to convey the meaning of different words, without to make use of facial expressions or body language. Several pairs of volunteers were asked to play a kind of vocal charades. Their efforts were recorded by the researchers and the results among different pairs compared. The conclusion of the study was that there is a discernible pattern. For example, people trying to convey the idea of "up" tend to use a rising pitch, while using the opposite for "down".
A number of 18 contrasting word ideas were being expressed. The participant pairs tended to improve after several rounds. At the end of the practice, the partners were able to understand what idea was being expressed around 82.2 percent of the time. The conclusion of the study is that speech and gesture were two sides of the same coin, mutually interacting to enhance communication.
