ABSTRACT
The human infant is equipped with an innate capacity to emit signals. Lip smacking, expressing pleasure, is present from the earliest weeks, and so are cries whose volume, pitch and timbre vary according to whether they express rage, pain or frustration. The parents were a well-balanced, affectionate couple and the root of Gavin’s difficulties appeared to lie in the past circumstances of the family’s life rather than in their present handling of him. Gavin had been a sickly, anaemic baby who had cried an excessive amount until he was eighteen months old. V. E. Negus has pointed out that it is incorrect and misleading to speak of the larynx as an organ of voice since it is primarily a valve which by firm. This function of the larynx, common only to man, whose larynx and oesophagus are at the same anatomical level, is as old as mankind – that is, roughly one million years old.
