SPEECH PHONES ARE A REPLICATION CODE

Our ability to map sound into pronunciation - vocal imitation - is nec essary for vocabulary learning, and so the existence of language. It i s also unexplained. Here I show that speech is imitable due because of the brain's use of the innate sensitivities of the vertebrate auditor y system for speech motor targets. Their public nature enables speech to transmit articulation information. These units I suggest closely li nk with phones, the minimal unit of speech segmentation. The conjectur e that phones function as a replicative code removes five unexplained anomalies in language science: (i) why nearly eight hundred phones exi st but any language uses only a tiny subset of them (evolutionarily th is makes no sense); (ii) why newborn infants hear phones of all langua ges; (iii) why animals also hear them; (iv) why the Wernicke's and Bro ca's areas arose from homologous areas in primates which process imita tion, and why (v) in humans these areas process nonspeech imitation.