What makes it difficult for mute people to speak?
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People who are mute generally fall into three categories –
1) Physical damage or malformation of the speech organs. Something like not having a tongue, or damaged vocal chords. They literally *cannot form speech.*
2) Mental damage or malformation of the brain in the areas required to process or form speech. Anything from a stroke that affects the nerves controlling the mouth/vocal chords to a more severe cognitive disruption that either means the person can’t mentally process language or how to “form” language. Our ability to process and form language develops during childhood and we have unfortunate examples of “feral” children who missed that developmental stage and despite having no physical or mental handicaps at birth, will never “learn” how to communicate or process language.
3) A related disorder such as complete deafness. A person who has a perfectly functioning set of speech organs and a healthy brain for language, yet is born profoundly deaf will never be able to speech “normally” because they can’t hear speech in the first place. As our modern medicine has really improved many hearing disorders this is getting much better thankfully. But long story short, a person with no ears will never speak “normally”.
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