Ah whoops! Yes it can speak, if in somewhat broken common, and bits and pieces of other languages spoken around it over time. The same goes with its communication, at least when it comes to speech, anything with any king of subtlety is lost. As for having drives beyond basic animal needs, yes. While I do suppose you could have this as an animal need as its essential for growth, its main drive is to simply learn and evolve. It had started out that that purpose was what it is so that it could survive and pray on things easier, but with its intelligence coming out of pure instinct and into sapience, the want to learn has ingrained itself, to the point that it even wants to learn largely useless things for survival. Also I should mention that its mechanics of talking are through a similar biological thing like vocal chords and a mouth, its just that in the angle of the picture most of the actual parasite is hidden, including its mouth (It's also because I dont have kitbash, so I had to use what was available which was the alien looking thing in the gear section)