ABSTRACT
Research on communicative development in humans has recently profited from microanalytic, experimental, interdisciplinary, and comparative approaches to preverbal forms of communication and has provided new arguments for the interpretation of both phylogeny and ontogeny of human communication. This chapter discusses them in relation to the contribution of dynamic systems theory and the adaptive relevance of human communication in the evolution of speech and in the genesis of culture. Culture has too often been viewed as an antipole of nature, and this view inhibited attention to biological origins of culture. Language, with its unexplainable, almost mythical origin, has shared the position with culture. Studies of deaf infants and deaf mothers throw additional light on the problem of innateness. Deaf infants cannot learn the language of their cultural environment without special help. The development of their preverbal vocalization is parallel to the development in hearing infants, although distinctly slower.
