age theory may well impinge on training techniques employed to develop communication structures between humans and the lower animal forms.
But Tylor's remark must be construed as a theoretical back-formation, for the conditioned responses of nonhuman primates and lower animal forms are not the same as human language. Tylor's psychosocial, psychophysical formulation or more exactly speculation was overtaken by Pavlov's demonstration of conditioned response and the behaviorist theory that modes of action and communication are at the conscious or subconscious level predicated of judgments about risk and reward. However valuable behaviorist theory may be in explaining conditioned response, it nonetheless appears inadequate to explain the process by which conscious response is transformed into a permanent strategy of rational communication. The explanation for that transformation lies elsewhere.
"Oral language is necessarily composed of arbitrary signs," writes Englefield (1977, p. 78). The same might have been said of any form of human communication, for it is the ability of meaningful coding that would seem to distinguish man from other animals. Written language most manifestly resorts to arbitrary coding to make meaning, but much the same contention may be made in respect of nonverbal and oral communication--indeed of any kind of communication predicated of human rationality. Indeed, much that is true of speech communication may also be true of nonverbal communication, but the focus here is on language as such. The search for a rational, not to say moral, language, is fundamental to the search for rational communication. But the constituents of such language are elusive as far as an understanding of how and why they have emerged and developed is concerned. Accordingly, it is appropriate to examine theories of language development with a view toward identifying a coherent basis on which to understand the whole range of activities tha...