ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies some issues that have to be considered in a biological approach to language development. Biological scientists have long warned each other to avoid teleological explanations for evolutionary phenomena. Language development is a weave of individual strands, strands of face-voice processing, vocal turn-taking, accommodation and mimicry, sound making and signalling, and so on. The infant's interest in, and ability to reproduce, language-like features of vocalisation - that is, its attentional and imitative mechanisms, are assumed to have been elevated by natural selection. The infant's development of language is thus produced by a mix of systems. Vocal learning and utterance storage act like "feedback devices" for language, but in actuality they, too, are the result of "programmes" that have other functions. In the journey to spoken language, the human infant is not animated by a single powerful goal, master language in order to convey information.
