The ability to understand cause-and-effect relationships as a key skill of homo loquens

The article analyzes human ability to understand cause-and-effect relationships and reveals the fundamental role of this cognitive skill in mastering articulate speech. The author highlights the relationship between tool activity carried out in a certain social context, encephalization in the hominid line, the development of frontal lobes of human brain (in particular, prefrontal cortex formations) and the improvement of the conceptual basis for the production of tools. These phenomena are associated with an increase in the capacity of the short-term component of working memory, which allows a person to keep attention on several objects and connections between them simultaneously, to carry out recursive actions, consistently operate with several concepts, generating recursive sentences. These processes make possible the emergence of human ability to understand causal dependencies and to build, analyze and understand sentences consisting of several words, as well as to create and understand the rules for their construction.