What are the biological reasons that prevent any animals being able to learn human language and converse with us?
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To some extent it is possible, as you can see in some videos on the internet (with cats and dogs that use buttons to talk).
However, our brain structure is geared towards language in a way that is not the case for other animals. So that’s why there are limits, along with obvious restrictions of producing sounds or using pen or keyboard.
Most don’t have the thick muscular tongue and lips that allow us to make lots of different sounds that we put together as speech. B & P use different mouth shapes to T & V which in turn are different to C &K and so on.
Try to make convincing bird chirps or dolphin sounds sometime. Tough if not impossible, right? Our mouths and vocal cords just can’t replicate those sounds. That’s one of the problems animals have with reproducing human speech – their airways, throats, mouths etc. just don’t have the right shapes for it.
Then there’s the matter of brains. We have parts of our brains dedicated to language and communication, and they’re pretty well developed. In other animals, not so much.
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