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Human infants engage in vocal communion with their mother and other prospective caregivers as soon as it becomes possible to do so. As the term is used here, 'communion' refers to a continuous state or feeling of connectedness owing to the existence of a communications link that is maintained largely by the vocalizations of infants and caregivers. It is proposed that certain types of vocalization that infants place in this channel encourage physical approach and caregiving. Several of the social behaviors that predict lexical learning, including joint attention and vocal imitation, are also, in theory, associated with maternal attachment. Since quality of attachment also predicts language development, research is needed to determine which behaviors are functionally related to language learning and which are only symptomatic of a relationship that is independently influential.

If evolutionary benefits associated with language were predominantly referential, as many theorists assume, then there must have been a preparatory stage in which an 'appetite' for information, not evident in the other primates, developed. To date, no such stage has been demonstrated. The problem dissipates, however, if it is assumed that language emerged from a function more nearly shared with other primates. An obvious candidate is displaying. Here I argue that performative functions associated with oral sound‐making provided initial pressures for vocal communication by promoting rank and relationships. These benefits, I suggest, facilitated conflict avoidance and resolution, collaboration, and reciprocal sharing of needed resources. By valuing the performative applications of language, which continue in modern humans, one can more easily derive speech from the social‐vocal behaviours of non‐human primates, providing greater continuity in accounts of linguistic evolution