Chapter 1: The Infant’S Voice Grows in Intimate Dialogue: How Musicality of Expression Inspires Shared Meaning

In this chapter I interpret evidence of the earliest stages of human communication in infancy, and draw conclusions about the purposes and feelings of action that lead to human speech, and to the fertile creativity of mature languages. The voice is revealed to be the first bridge between imaginative and inventive minds. What a foetus hears and learns from its mother’s speaking gives an introduction to the preferred sounds of a spoken world of many stories, stories that become experiences of a society carried through many generations.

The work on communication with infants gives precious information on the interpersonal and social motives of language, how it engages persons who speak it and understand it. It also shows how the nominative conventions and grammatical rules are first learned within an intimate sharing of qualities of creative experience of many kinds, giving identity to elements of the environment that have human uses in a cooperative community. At every stage, and in every encounter, the articulate voice does not merely inform about what is real and true in the world. It identifies persons as particular speakers and listeners; it cares about their wills and feelings and about their stories. Language is an invented tool for carrying out human desires in relationships, for defining habits, and for building memories.