This chapter includes miscellaneous thoughts that are not crucial to our argument but nonetheless important for an explanation of the emergence of language. Most of these thoughts gravitate around the concept of prosody - the song quality of speech - and its importance in the shareability of language. Simply put, prosody includes all vocal aspects of speech such as the tone of voice we use, the different emphases and pauses, and so on.
Prosody is often considered a secondary feature in linguistic interaction and as such we have not given it the attention that we now think prosody may warrant. As our research progressed it became apparent that prosody may play a much more important role then we had previously thought. Here are some of the theories that we have about prosody that have led us to believe that, in fact, it may have played and still play a crucial role in the emergence and the continued shareability of language.
In this chapter, we imagine how the exploitation of noises and vocalization of the everyday life of proto-humans might have led to prosody and, in turn, to language.
We also describe how seemingly unrelated everyday sounds come to be associated to all of our perceptual experiences and may have been exploited towards a shared system of vocalization.
We finish by describing the break-down of prosody, in certain expressions, as the consequence of attenuation.
Many of these ideas have been discussed previously in other chapters however, here, we slightly reframe them in a neural context. As previously mentioned, we think that the population dynamics that we have described in the context of sharing a language must be reflected at every step in a neural context.