ABSTRACT
The announced object of our symposium was to explore “The Transition from Prelinguistic to Linguistic Communication,” and the participants included many of the investigators who, over the last decade, have been working most mightily on this vexed and ancient topic. The history of our topic has been reviewed so often in recent years that it need not be passed in review yet again. What we know from those reviews is that we shall make little progress if we adhere either to the impossible account of extreme empiricism or the miraculous one of pure nativism. We might well begin by exploring some of these accounts.
