How are we able to emulate how other people speak and articulate specific words in our heads even though we have not heard them say a specific word before?
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Our brains interpret and construct speech using specific segments of it that are smaller than words called phonemes. These are the specific sounds that when combined together create the “phonetic whole” that a word is, for example sounds like “Th”, “Ou” ‘Hy”, “fy”, etc.
You can often predict how a person would say a word because you heard them speak the majority of phonemes present in that word while speaking other words, and as long as the most accented phoneme and at least some of them at the start or end are known to you then your brain can easily fill in the blank, usually that “filling” is not really accurate to the original but you don’t realise it because we have a natural tendency to focus on the start, end, and the accent in each word, and we kinda don’t care about the rest which slips through somewhere in the background.
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