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The so-called gestural theories of language origins have remained a central focus of language evolution research for at least a decade. Despite important differences, their varieties underscore the significance of visual, as opposed to vocal, channel of signal transmission. However, language is predominantly spoken; that is (excluding recent technologies, special ecological conditions, or high rates of congenital hearing impairment) it is the vocal modality that contemporary human societies universally use as default for linguistic communication. This immediately leads to the problem of how and why language would have transferred from being mostly-visual to mostly-vocal, which is what many influential researchers (e.g. Burling, 2005; Fitch 2010, Tallerman 2011) raise as a fundamental objection to the gestural variety. In our paper, we address a specific issue within this problem, focusing on one class of gestures orofacial gestures. Employing Hockett’s notion of total auditory feedback, we discuss the role of this feature in the emergence of speech. As detailed in section 2.1., we propose that auditory feedback may offer a partial solution to the modality transition problem.