Although language was first and foremost a social device, its initial utility was not so much in enabling a new level of collective technology or social organization, which it eventually did, or in transmitting skills, or in achieving larger political organizations, which it eventually did. Initially, it was used to construct conceptual models of the human universe (215).

I regard the transition from mimetic culture to semiotic (verbal) culture as the transition from percept-based mental processes to concept-based ones. As was the case with the notated forms of language – writing, math, science, computing and the Internet (Logan 1995, 2000a) – speech emerged as a form of conceptualization in order to deal with the complexity of hominid existence due to toolmaking, social organization, and mimetic communication. Verbal language did not emerge primarily for the purpose of communication because, as is claimed by Merlin Donald (1991) mimetic communication was quite a robust system of communication, though not a tool that allowed for conceptualization.

I believe that our first concepts were our first words. Each word acted as a strange attractor that united all the percepts associated with that word. For example, the word water brings to mind all of our percepts associated with water: the water we drink; the water we cook with; the water we bathe in and clean with; the water of rivers, ponds, lakes, and oceans; and the water that falls as rain, sleet, and snow.
Speech represents four distinct bifurcations:
1. the bifurcation from mimetic communication to verbal language,
2. the bifurcation from perceptual thought to conceptual thought,
3. the bifurcation from hominids to Homo sapiens sapiens, and
4. the bifurcation from the brain to the human mind.

Reflecting on these four bifurcations provides some interesting insights into the nature of language, literacy, and conceptualization. The bifurcation from mimetic communication to verbal language teaches us that there is an intimate connection between speech and the elements of mimetic communication. In fact speech or orality almost always entails the marriage of the spoken words with facial gestures, tone or prosody, hand signals, and body language. Without these devices borrowed from mimetic communication, the spoken word would be dead and wooden. It has often been pointed out that the words themselves in spoken language represent only a small part of what is communicated. This is perhaps an exaggeration but one that could only be made because mimetic communication is such an integral part of speech.