The earliest narratives were musical

Abstract

In a baby’s first months of life, adults direct a lot of ‘talk’ at them, to which they respond with obvious delight. Baby talk can be regarded as narrative (or proto-narrative), though of a very peculiar kind, since its recipients don’t understand a word of what is said to them. What then do babies respond to? And why do we talk to babies? The importance of these early narratives, both phylogenetically (as they evolved in our species), and ontogenetically (as they develop in each individual person), has interesting implications for the way that narratives have been used historically and culturally – in theory as well as practice.