Maya Gratier and Colwyn Trevarthen Musical Narrative and Motives for Culture in Mother–Infant Vocal Interaction [...] one of the most ubiquitous and powerful discourse forms in human communication is narrative. Narrative structure is even inherent in the praxis of social interaction before it achieves linguistic expression. (Bruner, 1990, p. 77). It takes about twelve months before a linguistic consciousness begins to emerge in the human infant. But this momentous accession to a realm of meaning where sounds and relations between sounds stand for things and events in symbolic ways crucially depends on a prehis- tory of meaningful communication by more direct, or more essential, means. The mastery of language enabling the discrete labelling of intentions, desires and beliefs with precise reference to non-present objects and events is generally associated with the singular develop- ment of human culture. Language and cultural knowledge are deemed to be two of the most distinctively human abilities. Thus having a con- sciousness of culture might depend on the child being able to under- stand words and speak, to partake in the conversational negotiation of norms and plans of action in talk or text. But well before infants start experimenting with newly acquired sounds of language, before they attend to the specific syllables that must be strung together to form a word standing for something in a local world of meaning held-in- common, they are involved in a non verbal semiosis of mimetic expression and sympathetic action, which is already distinctly human (Trevarthen, 1990; 1994). Journal of Consciousness Studies, 15, No. 10–11, 2008, pp. 122–58 Correspondence: mgratier@u-paris10.fr, gratier@gmail.com, c.trevarthen@ed.ac.uk