A word starts out in the speech region of the cerebral cortex of the left hemisphere, then the message through a nerve to an organ in your throat called the larynx. The larynx looks like a triangular box, the walls of the larynx are made of cartilage (firm, Jell-O like matter). there are nine cartilages in the larynx: Tree large impair ones: thyroid, epiglottic and cricoid;† and three that are paired: the aretnoid, the corniculate and the cuneiform cartilages.

Now getting back to that word, the nerve will tell the vocal folds (two bands of tissue stretched across the ring shaped cricoid cartilage)† to tighten up, as† the air from the trachea passes through, this causes the air to pass through quicker, which creates more sound waves (vibrations in the air that make sound), which creates sound. The tighter the vocal folds are, the faster the air goes through, so the bigger the Hertz (number of soundwaves going by per second) is, the higher the pitch of the sound will be.

Then, our word which is really a sound goes to the oral cavity/mouth to be shaped into a real word. Wow! Think how much work your body has to do to make a three word sentence!

Unfortunately some people loose lives great gift of speaking, to diseases like aphasia, laryngeal tumors and strokes. The worst is sensory aphasia that causes you to loose pretty much all types of communication because you can't remember what words mean. However, motor aphasia is quite serious to, because your vocal cords stop vibrating all together. Another way to lose your speech would be to damage one of your cranial nerves, because the brain can't send the message down to the vocal cords to tell them to vibrate or to the mouth to tell it to move. Most of these problems aren't very common, and it's usually not your fault if you get one of these, unless you get a laryngeal tumor, which is caused by smoking. Don't smoke!!