The brain regions that enable it are much more complex too. From ScienceDaily:
In recent years neuroanatomists discovered that Broca’s and Wernicke’s regions actually contain multiple neuroanatomical areas. Also, newly discovered language areas extend beyond the classical areas, even into the parietal lobe, with more connections between these areas than previously thought. Moreover, the traditional areas are involved in language comprehension as well as production. Scientist also learned that other regions of the brain are more important for language than once thought, including the right hemisphere and the cerebellum. Interestingly, language areas also turn out to be somewhat variable. For instance, in people who are born blind, language can spread to the occipital lobe (or visual brain).
Our brains process language with astonishing speed and ‘immediacy’, in a dynamic network of interacting brain areas. All the relevant information becomes available immediately, as we start combining the meanings of individual words, unifying the different sources of information. To speed up this process, our brain actively predicts what is coming next (for instance, we might expect ‘newspaper’ to follow ‘the editor of the …’).
As most utterances are part of a conversation, some information is usually already shared between the speaker and the listener. Speakers make sure that they mark ‘new information’, using the order of the words or pitch to focus the listener’s attention (after hearing that readers of the newspaper did not like the article, one could say ‘the EDITOR of the newspaper loved the article’). Only when relevant ‘new’ information is unexpected or ungrammatical, people’s brains are shown to react. Listeners likely process ‘old’ information in a ‘good-enough’ manner, ignoring some of the details, explains Hagoort, which is why they do not seem to notice unexpected ‘old’ information.
To make matters even more complex, language is often indirect. To know what a speaker really means, listeners need to infer a speaker’s intention. For instance, ‘It is hot here’ could well be intended as a request to open the window, rather than a statement about the temperature. Neuroimaging studies show that such ‘pragmatic’ inferences depend on brain areas that are involved in ‘Theory of Mind’, or thinking about other people’s beliefs, emotions and desires.
Language is a “complex biocultural hybrid,” concludes Hagoort.Paper. (paywall) – Peter Hagoort. The neurobiology of language beyond single-word processing. Science, 2019 DOI: 10.1126/science.aax0289 More.
That’s only the beginning. Glad someone understands.
See also: The real reason why only human beings speak Language is a tool for abstract thinking—a necessary tool for abstraction—and humans are the only animals who think abstractly (Michael Egnor)
and
Can we talk? Language as the business end of consciousness
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Actually, people like E.W. Bullinger (author of Figures of Speech Used in the Bible) and John W.V. Macbeth (author of The Might and Mirth of Literature), who wrote during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, knew how complex language was from their study of figures of speech. It was when modern linguistics forced a Darwinist paradigm down everyone’s throat that the study of language became stupidly simplistic. But now, evidently, in postmodern times, we’re going “back to the future” (or actually that would be “ahead to the past”).
“Hang on kids!” Lol…
as to:
First off, sticking the label ‘biocultural hybrid’ onto the distinctly human capacity for language still does not come anywhere close to explaining the supposed evolutionary origin, i.e. materialistic origin, of language.
Secondly, the ‘production’ of language and/or functional information lies at the heart of the debate between ID advocates and Darwinists.
Darwinists cannot even explain where the information for a single modestly sized functional protein, (i.e. 150 amino acids long), of a single neuron came from. Much less can they explain how the trillions upon trillions of neurons in our brain cohere into a single unified whole to produce our ‘beyond belief’ brain:
In fact, the ‘production’ of a single sentence of language and/or functional information by humans is, on materialistic terms, to be considered, by all rights, a ‘miracle’:
It is fairly easy to understand why information and/or language will never be a ‘production’ of the material brain. Information is a unique and independent entity that is separate from matter and energy. An entity that is fundamentally immaterial in its foundation characteristic.
As George Williams, an evolutionary biologist, honestly admitted, “”Evolutionary biologists have failed to realize that they work with two more or less incommensurable domains: that of information and that of matter… These two domains will never be brought together in any kind of the sense usually implied by the term ‘reductionism.’… Information doesn’t have mass or charge or length in millimeters. Likewise, matter doesn’t have bytes…,,,”
Moreover, the fact that functional information is fundamentally immaterial, and will therefore NEVER be compatible with the reductive materialistic explanations of Darwinists, is now verified by empirical science. Specifically, non-local, i.e. beyond space and time, quantum entanglement and/or quantum information, which is not reducible to any possible materialistic explanation, is now found to be ubiquitous within life. For instance, Quantum criticality in now found in a wide range of important biomolecules:
Simply put, Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic framework, have no beyond space and time cause to appeal to in order to give an adequate explanation for the massive amount of ‘non-local’ quantum entanglement/information that is now found pervasively throughout molecular biology.
Whereas, on the other hand, Chritstian Theists do have a beyond space and time cause to appeal to to explain the massive amount of non-local quantum entanglement/information that is now found pervasively throughout molecular biology.
Moreover, besides life, immaterial information is also now found to be foundatonal to the universe itself. As Vlatko Vedral, who is a Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, states,
And in the following video, at the 48:24 mark, Anton Zeilinger states that “It is operationally impossible to separate Reality and Information” and then he even goes on at the 49:45 mark of the video to note the Theological significance of the Bible verse “In the Beginning was the Word” John 1:1
It is hard to imagine a more convincing proof that we are ‘made in the image of God’, than finding that both the universe and life itself are ‘information theoretic’ in their foundational basis, and that we, of all the creatures on earth, uniquely possess an ability to understand and create information, and have come to ‘master the planet’ precisely because of our ability to infuse immaterial information into material substrates.
I guess a more convincing proof that we are made in the image of God could be if God Himself became a man, defeated death on a cross, and then rose from the dead to prove that He was God.
And that is precisely the evidence and/or proof that is claimed within Christianity.
Verse:
I find it absolutely incredible – and I mean, ‘literally’ incredible – that there has been all this hoo-haa about dating the Shroud of Turin, when the image on it is a photogrpahic negative ! I mean who would have thought in the days before photography of even TRYING to imagine what a photographic negative, i.e. reversing light and shade on ANY IMAGE, never mind a shroud, would look like?! In a month of Sundays. The way negatives look now, as well as that on the Shroud, surprise me no end. A fault of my imagination, I know, but still and all…. Yet the highest levels of education are evidently no proof against such common, everyday madness. The banality of idiocy makes a nice bookend with the banality of evil, doesn’t it ?