Prelinguistic Babblings.

No part of the life of a child appeals to us more powerfully perhaps than the first use of our language. The small person’s first efforts in linguistics win us by a certain graciousness, by the friendly impulse they disclose to get mentally near us, to enter into the full fruition of human intercourse. The difficulties, too, which we manage to lay upon the young learner of our tongue, and the way in which he grapples with these, lend a peculiar interest, half pathetic, half humorous, to this field of infantile activity. To the scientific observer of infancy, moreover, the noting of the stages in the acquisition of speech is of the first importance. Language is sound moulded into definite forms and so made vehicular of ideas; and we may best watch the unfoldings of childish thought by attending to the way in which the word-sculptor takes the plastic sound-material and works it into its picturesque variety of shapes.

A special biological and anthropological interest attaches to the child’s first essays in the use of words. Language is that which most obviously marks off human from animal intelligence. One of the most interesting problems in the science of man’s origin and early development is how he first acquired the power of using language-signs. If we proceed on the biological principle that the development of the individual represents in its main stages that of the race, we may expect to find through the study of children’s use of language hints as to how our race came by the invaluable endowment. How far it is reasonable to expect from a study of nursery linguistics a complete explanation of the process by which man became speechful, homo articulans, will appear later on. But an examination of these linguistics ought surely to be of some suggestive value here.

While there is this peculiar scientific interest in the first manifestations of the speech-faculty in the child, they are of a kind to lend themselves particularly well to a methodic and exact observation. Articulate sounds are sensible objects having well-defined characters which may be accurately noted and described where the requisite fineness of ear and quickness of perception are present. The difficulties are no doubt great here: but they are precisely the difficulties to sharpen the appetite of the true naturalist. Hence we need not wonder that early articulation fills a large place in the naturalist’s observation of infant life. Preyer, for example, devotes one of the three sections of his well-known monograph to this subject, and gives us a careful and elaborate account of the progress of articulation and of speech up to the end of the period dealt with (first three years).

Since these studies are especially concerned with the characteristics of the child after language has been acquired I shall not enter into the history of his rudimentary speech at any great length. At the same time, since language is a realm of activity in which the child betrays valuable characteristics long after the third year, it deserves a special study in this volume.

As everybody knows, long before the child begins to speak in the conventional sense he produces sounds. These are at first cries and wanting in the definiteness of true articulate sounds. Such cries are expressive, that is, utterances of changing conditions of feeling, pain and pleasure, and are also instinctive, springing out of certain congenital nervous arrangements by which feeling acts upon the muscular organs. This crying gradually differentiates itself into a rich variety of expressions for hunger, cold, pain, joy and so forth, of which it is safe to say that the majority of nurses and mothers have at best but a very imperfect knowledge.

These cries disclose from the first a germ of articulate sound, viz., according to Preyer an approach to the vowel sounds u (oo) and Ä (Engl. a in ‘made’). This articulate element becomes better defined and more varied in the later cries, and serves in part to differentiate them one from the other. Thus a difference of shade in the a (in ‘ah’), difficult to describe, has been observed to mark off the cry of pleasure and of pain. Along with this articulate sounds begin to appear in periods of happy contentment under the form of infantile babbling or ‘la-la-ing’. Thus the child will bring out a string of a and other vowel sounds. In this baby-twittering the several vowel sounds of our tongue become better distinguishable, and are strung together in queer ways, as ai-a-au-Â. An attempt is made by Preyer and others to give the precise order of the appearance of the several vowel sounds. It is hardly to be expected that observers would agree upon a matter so difficult to seize and to describe; and this is what we find.^[60] After allowing, however, for differences in the reading off, it seems probable that there is a considerable diversity in the order of development in the case of different children. This applies still more to the appearance of the consonantal sounds which long before the end of the sixth month become combined with the vowels into syllabic sounds, as pa, ma, mam, and so forth. Thus, though the labials b, p, m, seem to come first in most cases, they may be accompanied, if not preceded, by others, as the back open sound ch (in Scotch ‘loch’), or (according to Preyer and others) by the corresponding voiced sound, the hard g. Similarly, sounds as l and r, which commonly appear late, are said in some instances to occur quite early.^[61] Attempts have been made to show that the order of sounds here corresponds with that of advancing physiological difficulty or amount of muscular effort involved. Yet apart from the fact just touched on, that the order is not uniform, it is very questionable whether the more common order obeys any such simple physiological law.

This primordial babbling is wonderfully rich and varied. According to Preyer it contains most, if not all the sounds which are afterwards used in speaking, and among these some which cause much difficulty later on. It is thus a wondrous contrivance of nature by which the child is made to rehearse months beforehand for the difficult performances of articulate speech. It is a preliminary trying of the vocal instrument throughout the whole of its register.

Though nurses are apt to fancy that in this pretty babbling the infant is talking to itself there is no reason to think that it amounts even to a rudiment of true speech. To speak is to use a sound intentionally as the sign of an idea. The babbling baby of five months cannot be supposed to be connecting all these stray sounds with ideas, if indeed it can be said to have as yet any definite ideas. The only signification which this primitive articulation can have is emotional. Undoubtedly, as we have seen, it grows out of expressive cries. Even the happy bubblings over of vowel sounds as the child lies on his back and ‘crows,’ may be said to be expressive of his happiness like the movements of arms and legs which accompany it. Yet it would be an exaggeration to suppose that the elaborate phonation is merely expressive, that all the manifold and subtle changes of sound are due to obscure variations of feeling.

The true explanation seems to be that the appearance of this infantile babbling, just like that of the movements of the limbs which accompany it, is the result of changes in the nervous system. As the centres of vocalisation get developed, motor impulses begin to play on the muscles of throat, larynx, and, later on, lips, tongue, etc., and in this way a larger and larger variety of sound and sound-combination is produced. Such phonation is commonly described as impulsive. It is instinctive, that is to say, unlearnt, and due to congenital nervous connexions; and at best it can only be said to express in its totality a mood or relatively permanent state of feeling.

As this impulsive articulation develops it becomes complicated by a distinctly intentional element. The child hears the sounds he produces and falls in love with them. From this moment he begins to go on babbling for the pleasure it brings. We see the germ of such a pleasure-seeking babbling in the protracted iterations of the same sound. The first reduplications and serial iterations, a-a, ma-ma, etc., may be due to physiological inertia, the mere tendency to move along any track that happens to be struck, the very same tendency which makes a prosy speaker go on repeating himself. At the same time there is without doubt in these infantile iterations a rudiment of self-imitation. That is to say, the child having produced a sound, as na or am, impulsively proceeds to repeat the performanceperformance in order to obtain a renewal of the sound-effect. This renewed impulse may be supposed further to bring with it a germ of the pleasure of iteration of sound, or assonance. The addition of a simple rhythmic character to the series of sounds is a further indication of its pleasure-seeking character. Indeed we have in this infantile ‘la-la-ing’ more a rudiment of song and music than of articulate speech. The rude vocal music of savages consists of a similar rhythmic threading of meaningless sounds in which as in this infantile song changes of feeling reflect themselves. We may best describe this infantile babbling then as voice-play and as rude spontaneous singing, the utterance of a mood, indulged in for the sake of its own delight, and serving by a happy arrangement of nature as a preliminary practice in the production of articulate or linguistic sounds.

Transition to Articulate Speech.

Let us now seek to understand how this undesigned trying of the articulate instrument passes into true significant articulation, how this speech-protoplasm develops into the organism that we call language. And here the question at once arises: Does the child tend to utilise the sounds thus acquired as signs apart from the influence of education, that is to say, of the articulate sounds produced by others and impressed as signs upon his attention? The question is not easy to answer owing to the early development of the imitative impulse and to the constant and all-pervading influence of education in the nursery. Yet I will offer a tentative answer.

That a child when he has reached a certain stage of intelligence would be able to make use of signs quite apart from example and education is what one might expect. Any one who has noticed how a young cat, completely isolated from the influence of example, will spontaneously hit on the gesture of touching the arm of a person sitting at a meal by way of asking to be fed, cannot be surprised that children should prove themselves capable of inventing signs. We know, too, that deaf-mutes will, self-prompted, develop among themselves an elaborate system of gesture-signs, and further express their feelings and desires by sounds, which though not heard by themselves may be understood by others and so serve as effective signs of their needs and wishes. The normal child, too, in spite of the powerful influences which go to make him adopt as signs the articulate sounds employed by others, shows a germ of unprompted and original sign-making. The earliest of such unlearnt signs are simple gesture-movements, such as stretching out the arms when the child desires to be taken by the nurse.^[62] Nobody has suggested that these are learnt by imitation. The same is true of other familiar gesture-movements, which appear towards the end of the first year or later, as pulling your dress just as a dog does, when the child wants you to go with him, touching the chair when he wants you to sit down, or (as Darwin’s child did when just over a year) taking a bit of paper and pointing to the fire by way of signifying his wish to see the paper burnt. The gesture of pointing, though no doubt commonly aided by example, is probably capable of being reached instinctively as an outgrowth from the grasping movement.

These gesture-signs, I find, play a larger part in the case of children who are backward in talking, and so are nearer the condition of the deaf-mute. Thus a lady in sending me notes on her three children remarks that the one who was particularly backward in his speech made a free use of gesture-signs. When sixteen months old he had certain general signs of this sort, using a sniff as a sign of flower, and a mimic kiss as a sign of living things, i.e., all sorts of animals.^[63]

Just as movements may thus be used instinctively, that is, without aid from others’ example, both as expressing simple feelings and desires, and also, as in the case just mentioned, as indicating ideas, so spontaneously formed sounds may be used as signs. As pointed out above the first self-prompted articulation is closely connected with feeling, and we find that in the second half-year when the preliminary practice has been gone through certain sounds take on a distinctly expressive function. Thus one little boy when eight months old habitually used the sound ‘ma-ma’ when miserable, and ‘da-da’ when pleased. Among these instinctive expressive sounds one of the most important is that indicative of hunger. I find again and again that a special sound is marked off as a mode of expression or sign of this craving. This fact will be referred to again presently.

True language-sounds significant of things grow out of this spontaneous expressive articulation. Thus the demonstrative sign da which accompanies the pointing, and which seems to be frequently used with slight modifications by German as well as by English children, is probably in its inception merely an interjectional expression of the faint shock of wonder produced by the appearance in the visual field of a new object. But used as a concomitant of the pointing gesture it takes on a demonstrative or indicative function, announcing the presence or arrival of an object in a particular locality or direction. A somewhat similar case is that of ‘ata’ or ‘tata,’ a sign used to denote the departure or disappearance of an object. These signs are, as Preyer shows, spontaneous and not imitative (e.g., of ‘there’ (da), ‘all gone’). This is confirmed by the fact that they vary greatly. Thus Preyer’s boy used for “there” ‘da,’ ‘nda,’ ‘nta,’ etc., and for “all gone” ‘atta,’ ‘f-tu,’ ‘tuff,’ etc. Again, Tiedemann’s boy used the sound ‘ah-ah,’ and one of Stanley Hall’s children the sound ‘eh,’ when pointing to an object. We may conclude then that there are spontaneous vocal reactions expressive of the contrasting mental states answering to the appearance or arrival and the disappearance or departure of an impressive and interesting object, and that, further, these reactions when recognised by others tend to become fixed as linguistic signs.^[64]

Just as in the case of the gesture-movements, sniffing, kissing, so in that of expressive vocal sounds we may see a tendency to take on the function of true signs of ideas. One of the best illustrations of this is to be found in the invention of a word-sound for things to eat. I have pointed out that the state of hunger with its characteristic misery becomes at an early stage marked off by a distinctive expressive sign. At a later stage this or some other sound comes to be used intelligently as a means of asking for food. Darwin’s boy employed the sound mum in this way; another English child used ‘numby,’ and yet another ‘nini’; a French child observed by M. Taine made use of ‘ham’. The predominance of the labial m shows the early formation of these quasi-linguistic signs, and suggests that they were developed out of the primary instinctive ‘m’ sound.^[65] Such sounds, coming to be understood by the nurse, tend to become fixed as modes of asking for food.

It seems but a step from the demand ‘Give me food’ to the pointing out or naming of things as food. And so good an observer as Darwin says that his boy used the sound ‘mum’ not only for conveying the demand or command ‘Give me food,’ but also as a substantive ‘food’ of wide application. He later went on to erect a rudimentary classification on the basis of this substantive, calling sugar ‘shu-mum’ and even breaking up this subdivision by calling liquorice “black shu-mum”.^[66] This however seems, so far as I can ascertain, to be exceptional. In most vocabularies of children of two or three no generic term for food is found, though names for particular kinds of food, e.g., milk, bread, are in use. This agrees with the general order of development of thought-signs, the names of easily distinguished species appearing in the case of the individual as in that of the race before those of comprehensive and ‘abstract’ genera such as ‘food’. It is probable, therefore, that these early signs for food are but imperfectly developed into true thought-symbols or names. They retain much of their primordial character as expressions of desire and possibly of the volitional state answering to a command. This is borne out by the fact that the child spoken of by Taine used the sound ‘tem’ as a sort of general imperative for ‘give!’ ‘take!’ ‘look!’ etc.^[67]

Another early example of an emotional expression passing into a germinal sign is that called forth at the sight of moving creatures. This acts as a strong stimulus to the baby brain, and vigorous muscular reactions, vocal and other, are wont to appear. One little boy of twelve and three-quarter months usually expressed his excitement by the sound “Do-boo-boo,” which was used regularly for about ten days on the appearance of a dog, a horse, a bird, and so forth. Here we have a protoplasmic condition of the lingual organism which we call a name, a condition destined never to pass into another and higher. Sometimes, however, these explosives at the sight of animal life grow into comparatively fixed signs of recognition.

In this spontaneous invention of quasi-linguistic sounds imitation plays a considerable part. It is evident, indeed, that gestures are largely imitative. Thus the sniff and the mimic kiss referred to just now are plainly imitations of movements. The pointing gesture, too, may be said to be a kind of imitation of the reaching and appropriating movement of the arm. The sound ‘do-boo-boo’ used on seeing an animal was probably imitative. According to Preyer the sounds called forth by the sight of moving objects, e.g., rolling balls and wheels, are imitative.^[68] Whether the signs of hunger, ‘mum,’ ‘numby,’ are due to modifications of the movements carried out in sucking, seems to be more problematic.^[69]

In certain cases imitation is the one sufficient source of the sound. In what are called onomatopoetic sounds the child seeks to mimic some natural sound, and such imitation is capable of becoming a fruitful source of original linguistic invention. A boy between nine and ten months imitated the sound of young roosters by drawing in his breath, and this noise became for a time a kind of name for any feathered creature, including small birds. More commonly such onomatopoetic sounds come to be distinctive recognition-signs of particular classes of animals, such as ‘oua-oua’ or ‘bow-wow’ for the dog, ‘moo-moo’ for the cow, ‘ouack-ouack’ or ‘kuack’ for the duck, and so forth.

It may, of course, be said that these mimic sounds are in part learnt from the traditional vocabulary of the nursery, in which the nurse takes good care to instruct the child. But it is to be remembered that the traditional nursery language itself is largely an adoption of children’s own sounds. There is, moreover, ample independent evidence to show that children are zealous and indefatigable imitators of the sounds they hear as of the movements they see. Towards the end of the first six months and during the second half-year a child is apt to imitate eagerly any sound you choose to produce before him. In the case of Preyer’s boy this impulse to repeat the sounds he heard developed into a kind of echoing mania. The acquisition of others’ language plainly depends on the existence and the vigour of this mimetic impulse. And this same impulse leads the child beyond the servile adoption of our conventional sounds to the invention of new or onomatopoetic sounds. Thus one little child discovered the pretty sound ‘tin-tin’ as a name for the bell. Another child, a girl, quite unprompted, used a chirping sound for a bird, and a curious clicking noise on seeing the picture of a horse (no doubt in imitation of the sound of a horse’s hoofs); while a little boy used a faint whistle to indicate a bird, and the sound ‘click-click’ to denote a horse. In some cases a grown-up person’s imitation of a sound is imitated. Thus a child of about two used the sound ‘afta’ as a name for drinking, and also for drinking-vessel, “in imitation of the sound of sucking in air which the nurse used to make when pretending to drink”.^[70]

In these two sources of original child-language, expression of states of feeling, desire, etc., and imitation, we have the two commonly assigned origins of human language. Into the difficult question how man first came to the use of language-sounds I do not propose to enter here. Whatever view may be taken with respect to the first beginnings of human speech, there seems little doubt that both expressive cries and imitations of natural sounds have had their place. To this extent, then, we may say that there is a parallelism between the early evolution of language in the case of the individual and in that of the race. Not only so, it may be said that our study of these tentatives of the child in language-formation tends to confirm the conclusions of philology and anthropology that the current of human speech did probably originate, in main part at least, by way of these two tributaries.^[71]

While vocal sounds which are clearly traceable to emotional expressions or to imitations form the staple of the normal child’s inventions they do not exhaust them. Some of these early self-prompted linguistic sounds cannot be readily explained. I find, for example, that children are apt to invent names for their nurses and sometimes for themselves which, so far as I can ascertain, bear no discoverable resemblance to the sounds used by others. Thus the same little girl that invented ‘numby’ for food and ‘afta’ for drinking called her nurse ‘Lee’ though no one else called her by any other name than ‘nurse’. It is difficult to suppose that the child was transforming the sound ‘nurse’ in this case. Preyer’s boy called his nurse, whom others addressed as Marie, ‘WolÁ,’ which Preyer explains rather forcedly as deriving by inversion from the frequently heard ‘Ja wohl!’ A lady friend informs me that her little boy when thirteen months old called himself ‘Bla-a,’ though he was always addressed by others as Jeffrey, and that he stuck to ‘Bla-a’ for six months.^[72] A germ of imitation is doubtless recognisable here in the preservation of the syllabic form or structure (that of monosyllable or dissyllable). Yet the amount of transformation is, to say the least, surprising in children, who show themselves capable of fairly close imitation. Possibly a child’s ear notes analogies of sound which escape our more sophisticated organ. However this be, the fact of such origination of names (other than those clearly onomatopoetic) is noteworthy.

Lastly a reference may be made to the fact that children have shown themselves capable of inventing the rudiments of a simple kind of language. Professor Horatio Hale of America has made a special study of these spontaneous child-languages. One case is that of twin American boys who when the talking age came employed not the English sounds that they heard others speak but a language of their own. Another, and in some ways more remarkable case, is that of a little girl who at the age of two was backward in speaking, only using the names ‘papa’ and ‘mamma,’ and who, nevertheless, at that age, and in the first instance without any stimulus or aid from a companion, proceeded to invent a vocabulary and even simple sentence-forms of her own, which she subsequently prevailed on an elder brother to use with her. The vocables struck out, though suggesting some slight aural acquaintance with French—which, however, was never spoken in her home—are apparently quite arbitrary and not susceptible of explanation by imitation.^[73]

I think the facts here brought together testify to the originality of the child in the field of linguistics. It may be said that in none of these cases is the effect of education wholly absent. A child, as we all know, is taught the names of objects and actions long before he can articulate. Thus Darwin’s boy knew the name of his nurse five months before he invented the vocable ‘mum’. It is obvious indeed that wherever children are subjected to normal training their sign-making impulse is stimulated by the example of others. At the same time the facts here given show that the working of this impulse may, in a certain number of children at least, strike out original lines of its own independently of the direct action of example and education. What is wanted now is to experiment carefully with an intelligent child, encouraging him to make signs by patient attention and ready understanding, but at the same time carefully abstaining from giving the lead or even taking up and adopting the first utterances so as to bring in the influence of imitation. I think there is little doubt that a child so situated might develop the rudiments of a vocal language. The experiment would be difficult to carry out, as it would mean the depriving of the child for a time of the advantages of education.^[74]

Beginnings of Linguistic Imitation.

The learning of the mother-tongue is one of the most instructive and, one may add, the most entertaining chapters in the history of the child’s education. The brave efforts to understand and follow, the characteristic and quaint errors that often result, the frequent outbursts of originality in bold attempts to enrich our vocabulary and our linguistic forms—all this will repay the most serious study, while it will provide ample amusement.

As pointed out above the learning of the mother-tongue is essentially a kind of imitation. The process is roughly as follows. The child hears a particular sound used by another, and gradually associates it with the object, the occurrence, the situation, along with which it again and again presents itself. When this stage is reached he can understand the word-sound as used by another though he cannot as yet use it. Later, by a considerable interval, he learns to connect the particular sound with the appropriate vocal action required for its production. As soon as this connexion is formed his sign-making impulse imitatively appropriates it by repeating it in circumstances similar to those in which he has heard others employ it.

The imitation of others’ articulate sounds begins, as already remarked, very early and long before the sign-making impulse appropriates them as true words. The impulse to imitate others’ movements seems first to come into play about the end of the fourth month; and traces of imitative movements of the mouth in articulation are said to have been observed in certain cases about this time. But it is only in the second half-year that the imitation of sounds becomes clearly marked. At first this imitation is rather of tone, rise and fall of voice, and apportioning of stress or accent than of articulate quality; but gradually the imitation takes on a more definite and complete character.^[75]

Towards the end of the year, in favourable cases, true linguistic imitation commences. That is to say, word-sounds gathered from others are used as such. Thus, a boy of ten months would correctly name his mother, ‘Mamma,’ his aunt, ‘Addy’ (Aunty), and a person called Maggie, ‘Azzie’.^[76] As already suggested, this imitative reproduction of others’ words synchronises, roughly at least, with the first onomatopoetic imitation of natural sounds.

Transformations of our Words.

As is well known the first tentatives in the use of the common speech-forms are very rough. The child in reproducing transforms, and these transformations are often curious and sufficiently puzzling.

The most obvious thing about these first infantile renderings of the adult’s language is that they are a simplification. This applies to all words alike. Monosyllables if involving a complex mass of sound are usually reduced, as when ‘dance’ is shortened to ‘da’. This clearly illustrates the difficulty of certain sound-combinations, a point to be touched on presently. More striking is the habitual reduction of dissyllables and polysyllables. Here we note that the child concentrates his effort on the reproduction of a part only of the syllabic series, which part he may of course give but very imperfectly. The shortening tends to go to the length of reducing to a monosyllable. Thus ‘biscuit’ becomes ‘bik,’ ‘Constance’ ‘tun,’ ‘candle’ ‘ka,’ ‘bread and butter’ ‘bup’ or ‘bu’. Polysyllables, though occasionally cut down to monosyllables, as when ‘hippopotamus’ became ‘pots,’ are more frequently reduced to dissyllables, as when ‘periwinkle’ was shortened to ‘pinkle’. Handkerchief is a trying word for the English child, and for obvious reasons has to be learnt. It was reduced by the eldest child of a family to ‘hankish,’ by the two next to ‘hamfisch’ and by the last two to ‘hanky’. The little girl M. also reduced the last two syllables to ‘fish,’ making the sound ‘hanfish’.

There seems to be no simple law governing these reductions of verbal masses. The accentuated syllable, by exciting most attention, is commonly the one reproduced, as when ‘nasturtium’ became ‘turtium’.^[77] In the case of long words the position of a syllable at the beginning or at the end of the word seems to give an advantage in this competition of sounds, the former by impressing the sound as the first heard (compare the way in which we note and remember the initial sound of a name),^[78] the latter by impressing it as the last heard, and therefore best retained. The unequal articulatory facility of the several sound-combinations making up the word may also have an influence on this unconscious selection. I think it not unlikely, too, that germs of a kind of Æsthetic preference for certain sounds as new, striking or fine, may co-operate here.^[79]

Such simplification of words is from the first opposed, and tends in time to be counteracted, by the growth of a feeling for their general form as determined by the number of syllables, as well as the distribution of stress and any accompanying alterations of tone or pitch. The infant’s first imitations of the sounds ‘good-bye,’ ‘all gone,’ and so forth, by couples which preserve hardly anything of the articulatory character, though they indicate the syllabic form, position of stress, and rising and falling inflection, illustrate the early development of this feeling. Hence we find in general an attempt to reproduce the number of syllables, and also to give the proper distribution of stress. Thus ‘biscuit’ becomes ‘bÍtchic,’ ‘cellar’ ‘sÍtoo,’ ‘umbrella’ ‘nobÉlla,’ ‘elephant’ ‘Étteno,’ or (by a German child) ‘ewebÓn,’ ‘kangaroo’ ‘kÓgglegoo,’ ‘hippopotamus’ ‘ippenpÓtany,’ and so forth.^[80]

As suggested above there goes from the first with the cutting down of the syllabic series a considerable alteration of the single constituent sounds. The vowel sounds are rarely omitted; yet they may be greatly modified, and these modifications occur regularly enough to suggest that the child finds certain nuances of vowel sounds comparatively hard to reproduce. Thus the short a in hat, and the long i (ai), seem to be acquired only after considerable practice.^[81] But it is among the consonants that most trouble arises. Many of these, as the sibilants or ‘hisses,’ s, sh, the various l and r sounds, the dentals, the “point-teeth-open” th and dh (in ‘thin,’ ‘this’), the back or guttural ‘stops,’ i.e., k and hard g, and others as j or soft g (as in ‘James,’ ‘gem’), appear, often at least, to cause difficulty at the beginning of the speech period. With these must be reckoned such combinations as st, str.

In many cases the difficult sounds are merely dropped. Thus ‘poor’ may become ‘poo,’ ‘look’ ‘ook,’ ‘Schulter’ (German) ‘Ulter’. In the case of awkward combinations this dropping is apt to be confined to the difficult sound, provided, that is to say, the other is manageable alone. Thus ‘dance’ becomes ‘dan,’ ‘trocken’ (German) becomes ‘tokko’. More particularly s and sh are apt to be omitted before other consonants. Thus ‘stair’ becomes ‘tair,’ ‘sneeze’ ‘neeze,’ ‘schneiden’ (German) ‘neida,’ and so forth.

Along with such lame omissions we have the more vigorous procedure of substitutions. In certain cases there seems little if any kinship between the sounds or the articulatory actions by which they are produced. At the early stage more particularly almost any manageable sound seems to do duty as substitute. The early-acquired labials, including the labio-dental f come in as serviceable ‘hacks’ at this stage. What we call lisping is indeed exemplified in this class of infantile substitutions. Children have been observed to say ‘fank’ for ‘thank’ and ‘mouf’ for ‘mouth,’ ‘feepy’ for ‘sleepy,’ ‘poofie’ for ‘pussy,’ ‘wiver’ for ‘river,’ ‘Bampe’ for ‘Lampe’ (German). The dentals, too, d and t, are turned to all kinds of vicarious service. Thus we find ‘ribbon’ rendered by ‘dib,’ ‘gum’ by ‘dam,’ ‘Greete’ (German) by ‘Deete,’ ‘Gummi’ (German) by ‘Dummi,’ ‘cut’ by ‘tut,’ and ‘klopfen’ (German) by ‘topfen’. Similarly ‘gee-gee’ (horse), which oddly enough was first rendered by the child M. as ‘dee-gee,’ is altered to ‘dee-dee’. I find too that new sounds are apt to be put to this miscellaneous use. Thus one child after learning the aspirate (h) at two years not only brought it out with great emphasis in its proper place but began to use it as a substitute for other and unmanageable sounds. Thus he would say, ‘hie down on hofa’ for ‘lie down on sofa’. The aspirate is further used in place of sh, as when ‘shake’ was rendered by ‘hate,’ and of st, as when Preyer’s boy called ‘Stern’ ‘Hern’. In other cases we see that the little linguist is trying to get as near as possible to the sound, and such approximations are an interesting sign of progress. Thus in one case ‘chatterbox’ was rendered by ‘jabberwock,’ in another case ‘dress’ by ‘desh,’ in another (Preyer’s boy), ‘Tisch’ (German) by ‘Tiss’.^[82]

Besides omissions and substitution of sounds, occasional insertions are said to occur. According to one set of observations r may be inserted after the broad a, as when ‘pocket’ was rendered by ‘barket’. A cockney is apt to do the same, as when he talks of having a ‘barth’ (bath). Yet this observation requires to be verified.

These alterations of articulate sound by the child remind one of the changes which the languages of communities undergo. We know, indeed, that these changes are due to imperfect imitation by succeeding generations of learners.^[83] Hence we need not be surprised to find now and again analogies between these nursery transformations and those of words in the development of languages. In reproducing the sounds which he hears a child often illustrates a law of adult phonetic change. Thus changes within the same class of sounds, as the frequent alteration of ‘this’ into ‘dis,’ clearly correspond with those modifications recognised in Grimm’s Law. So, too, the common substitution of a dental for a guttural has its parallel in the changes of racial language.^[84] Nobody again can note the transformation of n into m before f in the form ‘hamfish’ for ‘handkerchief’ without thinking of the Greek change of s?? into s? before , and like changes. Philologists may probably find many other parallels. One of them tells me that his little girl, on rendering sh by the guttural h, reproduced a change in Spanish pronunciation. M. Egger compares a child’s rendering of ‘trop’ (French) by ‘crop’ with the transformation of the Latin ‘tremere’ into ‘craindre’.

I have assumed here that children’s defective reproduction of our verbal sounds is the result of inability to produce certain sounds and not due to the want of a discrimination of the sounds by the ear. This may seem strange in the light of Preyer’s statement that the earlier impulsive babbling includes most, if not all, of the sounds required later on for articulation. This may turn out to be an exaggeration, yet there is no doubt, I think, that certain sounds, including some as the initial l which are common in the earlier babbling stage, are not produced at the beginning of the articulatory period. As the avoidance of these occurs in all children alike it seems reasonable to infer that they involve difficult muscular combinations in the articulatory organ. At the same time it seems going too far to say, as Schultze does, that the order of acquisition of sounds corresponds with the degree of difficulty. The very variability of this order in the case of different children shows that there is no such simple correspondence as this.^[85]

The explanation of those early omissions and alterations is probably a rather complex matter. To begin with, the speech-organs of a child may lose special aptitudes by the development of other and opposed aptitudes. A friend of mine, a physiologist, tells me that his little boy who said ‘ma-ma’ (but not ‘da-da’) at ten months lost at the age of nineteen months the use of m, for which he regularly substituted b. He suggests that the nasal sound m, though easy for a child in the sucking stage and accustomed to close the lips, may become difficult later on through the acquisition of open sounds. It is worth considering whether this principle does not apply to other inabilities. This, however, is a question for the science of phonetics.

We must remember, further, that it is one thing to carry out an articulatory movement as a child of nine months carries it out, ‘impulsively,’ through some congenitally arranged mode of exciting the proper motor centre, another thing to carry it out volitionally, i.e., in order to produce a desired result. This last means that the sound-effect of the movement has been learned, that the image or representation of it has been brought into definite connexion with a particular impulse, viz., that of carrying out the required movement: and this is now known to depend on the formation of some definite neural connexion between the auditory and the motor regions of the speech-centre. This process is clearly more complex than the first instinctive utterance, and may be furthered or hindered by various conditions. Thus a child’s own spontaneous babblings may not have sufficed to impress a particular sound on the memory; in which case his acquisition of it will be favoured or otherwise by the frequency with which it is produced by others in his hearing. It is probable that differences in the range and accuracy of production of sounds by nurse and mother tell from the first. The differences observable in the order of acquisition of sounds among children may be in part due to this, and not merely to differences in the speech-organ. It is probable, too, that children’s attention may be especially called to certain sounds or sound-groups, either because of a preferential liking for the sounds themselves, or because of a special need of them as useful names. M.’s mother assures me that the child seemed to dislike particular sounds as j, which she could and did occasionally pronounce, though she was given to altering them.^[86] Another lady writes that her boy at the age of twenty-two months surprised her by suddenly bringing out the combination ‘scissors’. He had just begun to use scissors in cutting up paper, and so had acquired a practical interest in this sound-mass.

We may now pass to another of the commonly recognised defects of early articulation, viz., the transposition of sounds or metathesis. Sometimes it is two contiguous sounds which are transposed, as when ‘star’ is rendered by ‘tsar’ and ‘spoon’ by ‘psoon’. Here the motive of the change is evidently to facilitate the combination. We have a parallel to this in the use of ‘aks’ (ax) for ‘ask,’ a transposition which was not long since common enough in the West of England.^[87] In other transpositions sounds are shifted further from their place. Preyer quotes a case in which there was a dislocation of vowel sounds, viz., in the transformation of ‘bite’ (German) into ‘beti’.^[88] Here there seems to be no question of avoiding a difficult combination. Other examples are the following: ‘hoogshur’ for ‘sugar’ (one of the first noticed at the age of two); ‘mungar’ for ‘grandmamma,’ ‘punga’ for ‘grandpapa,’ and ‘natis’ for ‘nasty’ (boy between eighteen and twenty-four months); and ‘boofitul’ for ‘beautiful’. Here again we have an analogy to defective speech in adults. When a man is very tired he is liable to precisely similar inversions of order. The explanation seems to be that the right group of sounds may present itself to the speaker’s consciousness without any clear apprehension of their temporal order. Perhaps quasi-Æsthetic preferences play a part here too. The child M. seems to have preferred the sequence m-n to n-m, saying ‘jaymen’ for ‘geranium’‘geranium’, ‘burman’ for ‘laburnum’.

Another interesting feature in this early articulation is the impulse to double sounds, to get a kind of effect of assonance or of rhyme by a repetition of sound or sound-group. The first and simplest form of this is where a whole sound-mass or syllable is iterated, as in the familiar ‘ba-ba,’ ‘gee-gee’ ‘ni-ni’ (for nice). Some children frequently turn monosyllables into reduplications, making book ‘boom-boom’ and so forth. It is, however, in attempting dissyllables that the reduplication is most common. Thus ‘naughty’ becomes ‘na-na,’ ‘faster’ ‘fa-fa,’ ‘Julia’ ‘dum-dum,’ and so forth, where the repeated syllable displaces the second original syllable and so serves to retain something of the original word-form. In some cases the second and unaccented syllable is selected for reduplication, as in the instance quoted by Perez, ‘peau-peau’ for ‘chapeau’. Such reduplications are sometimes aided by kinship of sound, as when the little girl M. changed ‘purple’ into its primitive form ‘purpur’.

These early reduplications are clearly a continuation of the repetitions observable in the earlier babbling, and grow out of the same motive, the impulse to go on doing a thing, and the pleasure of repetition and self-imitation. As is well known, these reduplications have their parallel in many of the names used by savage tribes.^[89]

In addition to these palpable reduplications of sound-masses we have repetitions of single sounds, the repeated sound being substituted for another and foreign one. This answers to what is called in phonetics ‘assimilations’.^[90] In the majority of cases the assimilation is ‘progressive,’ the change being carried out by a preceding on a succeeding sound. Examples are ‘Kikie’ for ‘Kitty,’ and ‘purpur’ for ‘purple’. This last transformation, though it was made by the little daughter of a distinguished philologist, was quite innocent of classical influence, and was clearly motived by the childish love of reduplication of sound. In many cases the substitution of an easy for a difficult sound seems to be determined in part by assimilation, as when ‘another’ was rendered by ‘annunner,’ ‘gateau’ (French) by ‘ca-co’. The assimilation seems, too, sometimes to work “regressively,” as when ‘thick’ becomes ‘kick,’ ‘Bonnie Dundee’ ‘Bun-dun,’ and ‘tortue’ (French) ‘tu-tu,’ in which two last reduplication is secured approximately or completely by change of vowel.^[91] There seem also to be cases of what may be called partial assimilation, that is, a tendency to transform a sound into one of the same class as the first. “If (writes a mother of her boy) a word began with a labial he generally concluded it with a labial, making ‘bird,’ for example, ‘bom’.” But these cases are not, perhaps, perfectly clear examples of assimilation.

Along with the tendency to reduplicate syllabic masses, we see a disposition to use habitually certain favourite syllables as terminations, more particularly the pet ending ‘ie’. Thus ‘sugar’ becomes ‘sugie,’ ‘picture’ ‘pickie,’ and so forth. One child was so much in love with this syllable as to prefer it even to the common repetition of sound in onomatopoetic imitation, naming the hen not ‘tuck-tuck’ as one might expect, but ‘tuckie’.

What strikes one in these early modifications of our verbal sounds by the child is the care for metrical qualities and the comparative disregard for articulatory characteristics. The number of syllabic sounds, the distribution of stress, as well as the rise and fall of vocal pitch, are the first things to be attended to, and these are, on the whole, carefully rendered when the constituent sounds are changed into other and often very unlike ones, and the order of the sounds is reversed. Again, the comparative fidelity in rendering the vowel sounds illustrates the prominence of the metrical or musical quality in childish speech. The love of reduplication, of the effect of assonance and rhyme, illustrates the same point. This may be seen in some of the more playful sayings of the child M., as ‘Babba hiding, Ice (Alice) spiding (spying)’.

As I have dwelt at some length on the defective articulation of children, I should like to say that their early performances, so far from being a discredit to them, are very much to their credit. I, at least, have often been struck with the sudden bringing forth without any preparatory audible trial of difficult combinations, and with a wonderful degree of accuracy. A child can often articulate better than he is wont to do. The little girl M., when one year six months, being asked teasingly to say ‘mudder,’ said with a laugh ‘mother,’ quite correctly—but only on this one occasion. The precision which a child, even in the second year, will often give to our vocables is quite surprising, and reminds me of the admirable exactness which, as I have observed, other strangers to our language, and more especially perhaps Russians, introduce into their articulation, putting our own loose treatment of our language to the blush. This precision, acquired as it would seem without any tentative practice, points, I suspect, to a good deal of silent rehearsal, nascent groupings of muscular actions which are not carried far enough to produce sound.

The gradual development of the child’s articulatory powers, as indicated partly by the precision of the sounds formed, partly by their differentiation and multiplication, is a matter of great interest. At the beginning, when he is able to reproduce only a small portion of a vocable, there is of course but little differentiation. Thus it has been remarked by more than one observer, that one and the same sound (so far at least as our ears can judge) will represent different lingual signs, ‘ba’ standing in the case of one child for both ‘basket’ and ‘sheep’ (‘ba lamb’), and ‘bo’ for ‘box’ and ‘bottle’. Little by little the sound grows differentiated into a more definite and perfect form, and it is curious to note the process of gradual evolution by which the first rude attempt at articulate form gets improved and refined. Thus, writes a mother, “at eighteen to twenty months ‘milk’ was ‘gink,’ at twenty-one months it was ‘ming,’ and soon after two years it was a sound between ‘mik’ and ‘milk’.” The same child in learning to say ‘lion’ went through the stages ‘un’ (one year eight months), ‘ion’ (two years), and ‘lion’ (two years and eight months). The little girl M., in learning the word ‘breakfast,’ advanced by the stages ‘bepper,’ ‘beffert,’ ‘beffust’. In an example given by Preyer, ‘grosspapa’ (grandpapa) began as ‘opapa,’ this passed into ‘gropapa,’ and this again into ‘grosspapa’. In another case given by Schultze the word ‘wasser’ (pronounced ‘vasser’) went through the following stages: (1) ‘vavaff,’ (2) ‘fafaff,’ (3) ‘vaffaff,’ (4) ‘vasse,’ and (5) ‘vasser’. In this last we have an interesting illustration of a struggle between the imitative impulse to reproduce the exact sound and the impulse to reduplicate or repeat the sound, this last being very apparent in the introduction of the second v and the ff in the first stage, and in the substitution of the f’s for v’s under the influence of the dominant final sound in the second stage. The student of the early stages of language growth might, one imagines, find many suggestive parallels in these developmental changes in children’s articulation.

The rapidity of articulatory progress might be measured by a careful noting of the increase in the number of vocables mastered from month to month. Although Preyer and others have given lists of vocables used at particular ages, and parents have sent me lists, I have met with no methodical record of the gradual extension of the articulate field. It is obvious that any observations under this head, save in the very early stages, can only be very rough. No observer of a talkative child, however attentive, can make sure of all the word-sounds used. It is to be noted, too, as we have seen above, that a child will sometimes show that he can master a sound and will even make a temporary use of it, without retaining it as a part of the permanent linguistic stock.^[92]

Logical Side of Children’s Language.

It is now time to pass from the mechanical to the logical side of this early child-language, to the meanings which the small linguist gives to his articulate sounds and the ways in which he modifies these meanings. The growth of a child’s speech means a concurrent progress in the mastery of word-forms and in the acquisition of ideas. In this each of the two factors aids the other, the advance of ideas pushing the child to new uses of sounds, and the growing facility in word-formation reacting powerfully on the ideas, giving them definiteness of outline and fixity of structure. I shall not attempt here to give a complete account of the process, but content myself with touching on one or two of its more interesting aspects.

A child acquires the proper use or application of a word by associating the sound heard with the object, situation or action in connexion with which others are observed to use it. But the first imitation of words does not show that the little mind has seized their full and precise meaning. A clear and exact apprehension of meaning comes but slowly, and only as the result of many hard thought-processes, comparisons and discriminations.

In these first attempts to use our speech, the child’s mind is innocent of grammatical distinctions. These arise out of the particular uses of words in sentence-structure, and of this structure the child has as yet no inkling. If, then, following a common practice, I speak of a child of twelve or fifteen months as naming an object, the reader must not suppose that I am ascribing to the baby-mind a clear grasp of the function of what grammarians call nouns (substantives). All that is implied in this way of speaking, is that the infant’s first words are used mainly as recognition-signs. There is from the first, I conceive, even in the gesture of pointing and saying ‘da!’ a germ of this naming process.

The progress of this rude naming or articulate recognition is very interesting. The names first learnt are either those of individuals, what we call proper names, as ‘mamma,’ ‘nurse,’ or those which, like ‘bath,’ ‘bow-wow,’ are at first applied to one particular object. It is often supposed that a child uses these as true singular names, recognising individual objects as such. But this is pretty certainly an error. He cannot note differences well enough or grasp a sufficient number of differential marks to know an individual as such, and he will, as occasion arises, quite spontaneously extend his names to other things which happen to have some interesting and notable points in common with the first. Thus ‘bow-wow,’ though first applied to one particular dog, is, as we know, at once extended to other dogs, pictures of dogs, and not infrequently other things as well. If then we speak of the child as generalising or widening the application of his terms, we must not be taken to mean that he goes through a process of comparing things which he perceives to be distinct, and discovering a likeness in these, but that he merely assimilates or recognises something like that which he has seen before without troubling to note the differences.

This extension of names or generalising process proceeds primarily and mainly by the feeling for the likenesses or the common aspects of things, though as we shall see presently their connexions of time and place afford a second and subordinate means of extension. The transference of a name from object to object through this apprehension of a likeness or assimilation has already been touched upon. It moves along thoroughly childish lines, and constitutes one of the most striking and interesting of the manifestations of precocious originality. Yet if unconventional in its mode of operation it is essentially thought-activity, a connecting of like with like, and a rudimentary grouping of things in classes.

This tendency to comprehend like things or situations under a single articulate sign is seen already in the use of the early indicative sign ‘atta’ (all gone). It was used by Preyer’s child to mark not only the departure of a thing but the putting out of a flame, later on, an empty glass or other vessel. By another child it was extended to the ending of music, the closing of a drawer and so on. Here, however, the various applications probably answer more to a common feeling of ending or missing than to an apprehension of a common objective situation.

Coming to words which we call names we find that the child will often extend a recognition-sign from one object to a second, and to our thinking widely dissimilar object through the discovery of some analogy. Such extension, moving rather along poetic lines than those of our logical classifications, is apt, as we have seen, to wear a quaint metaphorical aspect. A star, for example, looked at, I suppose, as a small bright spot, was called by one child an eye. The child M. called the opal globe of a lighted lamp a ‘moon’. ‘Pin’ was extended by another child to a crumb just picked up, a fly, and a caterpillar, and seemed to mean something little to be taken between the fingers. The same child used the sound ‘’at’ (hat) for anything put on the head, including a hair-brush. Another child used the word ‘key’ for other bright metal things, as money. Romanes’ child extended the word ‘star,’ the first vocable learned after ‘Mamma’ and ‘Papa,’ to bright objects generally, candles, gas-flames, etc. Taine speaks of a child of one year who after first applying the word “fafer” (from “chemin de fer”) to railway engines went on to transfer it to a steaming coffee-pot and everything that hissed or smoked or made a noise. In these last illustrations we have plainly a rudimentary process of classification. Any point of likeness, provided it is of sufficient interest to strike the attention, may thus serve as a basis of childish classification.

As with names of things so with those of actions. The crackling noise of the fire was called by one child ‘barking,’ and the barking of a dog was named by another ‘coughing’. We see from this that the particular line of analogical extension followed by a child will depend on the nature of the first impressions or experiences which serve as his starting point.

A like originality is apt to show itself in the first crude attempt to seize and name the relations of things. The child C. called dipping bread in gravy ‘ba’ (bath). Another child extended the word ‘door’ to “everything that stopped up an opening or prevented an exit, including the cork of a bottle, and the little table that fastened him in his high chair”.

In these extensions we see the tendency of child-thought towards ‘concretism,’ or the use of a simple concrete idea in order to express a more abstract idea. Children frequently express the contrast big, little, by the pretty figurative language ‘Mamma’ and ‘baby’. Thus a small coin was called by an American child a ‘baby dollar’. Romanes’ daughter, named Ilda, pointed out the sheep in a picture as ‘Mamma-ba’ and the lambs as ‘Ilda-ba’. It is somewhat the same process when the child extends an idea obtained from the most impressive experience of childish difficulty, viz., ‘too big,’ so as to make it do duty for the abstract notion ‘too difficult’ in general.

In this extension of language by the child we may discern, along with this play of the feeling for similarity, the working of association. This is illustrated by the case of Darwin’s grandchild, who when just beginning to speak used the common sign ‘quack’ for duck, then extended this to water, then, following up this associative transference by a double process of generalisation, made the sound serve as the name of all birds and insects on the one hand, and all fluid substances on the other.^[93]

The transference of the name ‘quack’ from the animal to the water is a striking example of the tendency of the young mind to view things which are presented together as belonging one to another and in a manner identical. Another curious instance is given by Professor Minto, in which a child, who applied the word ‘mambro’ to her nurse, went on to extend it by associative transference to the nurse’s sewing machine, then by analogy applied it to a hand-organ in the street, later on, through an association of hand-organ with monkey, to his india-rubber monkey. Here we have a whole history of change of word-meaning illustrating in curiously equal measure the play of assimilation and of association, and falling within a period of two years.^[94]

There is another way in which children are said to ‘extend’ names somewhat analogous to the processes of assimilation and associate transference. They are very fond of using the same word for opposed or other correlative ideas. In some cases we can see that this is due merely to confusion or want of discrimination. When, for example, Preyer’s boy confused ‘too little’ with ‘too much,’ and ‘yesterday’ with ‘to-morrow,’ going so far as to make a compound ‘heitgestern’ (i.e., heutegestern) to include both,^[95] it is easy to see that the child’s mind had reached merely the vague idea unsuitable in quantity in the one case, and time not present in the other; and that he failed to differentiate these ideas. In other cases where correlatives are confused, as when a child extended the sign of asking for an eatable (‘bit-ye’) to the act of offering anything to another, or when as in C.’s case ‘spend’ was made to do duty for ‘cost,’ ‘borrow’ for ‘lend,’ and ‘learn’ for ‘teach,’ the explanation is slightly different. A child can only acquire an idea of abstract relations slowly and by stages. Such words as lend, teach, call up first a pictorial idea of an action in which two persons are seen to be concerned. But the exact nature of the relation, and the difference in its aspect as we start from the one or the other term, are not perceived. Thus in thinking of a purchase over the counter, a child may be supposed to image the action but not clearly to distinguish the part taken by the person who buys and gives out money (‘spends’) and the part taken by the person who demands a price or fixes the cost. Perhaps we get near this vague awareness of a relation when we are aiding a violinist to tune his instrument. We may know that his note and our piano note do not accord, and yet be quite unable to determine their exact relation, and to fix the one as higher, the other as lower.

An interesting variety of this extension of names to correlatives is the transference of the attributes of causal agent to passive object, and vice versÂ. Thus a little girl of four called her parasol when blown by the wind ‘a windy parasol,’ and a stone that made her hand sore ‘a very sore stone’. A little Italian girl that had taken some nasty medicines expressed the fact by calling herself nasty (‘bimba cattiva’).^[96]

There is much in the whole of these changes introduced by the child into the uses or meanings of words which may remind one of the changes which go on in the growth of languages in communities. Thus the child’s metaphorical use of words, his setting forth of an abstract idea by some analogous concrete image, has its counterpart, as we know, in the early stages of human language. Tribes which have no abstract signs employ a metaphor exactly as the child does. Our own language preserves the traces of this early figurative use of words; as in ‘imbecile,’ weak, which originally meant leaning on a staff, and so forth.^[97]

Again, we may trace in the development of languages the counterpart of those processes by which children spontaneously expand what logicians call the denotation of their names. The word ‘sun’ has only quite recently undergone this kind of extension by being applied to other centres of systems besides our familiar sun. The multiplicity of meanings of certain words, as ‘post,’ ‘stock’ and so forth, points to the double process of assimilative and associative extension which we saw illustrated in the use of the child’s word ‘mambro’.

Once more, the child’s extension of a word from an idea to its correlative has its parallel in the adult’s use of language. As the vulgar expression ‘I’ll larn you’ shows (cf. the Anglo-Saxon leornian), a word may come to mean both to teach and to become taught. A like embracing of agent and object acted upon by the same word is seen in the ‘active’ and ‘passive’ meanings of words like the Latin penetrabilis (‘piercing’ and ‘pierceable’), and in the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ meanings of ‘pleasant’ and similar words. We are beginning, like the little girl quoted above, to speak of a ‘sore’ topic. Lastly, the movement of thought underlying the saying of the little Italian girl, ‘nasty baby,’ seems to be akin to that of the savage when he supposes that he appropriates the qualities of that which he eats.

The changes here touched upon have to do with what philologists call generalisation. As supplementary to these there is in the case of the growth of a community-language a process of specialisation, as when ‘physician’ from meaning a student of nature has come to mean one who has acquired and can practically apply one branch of nature-knowledge. In the case of the child we have an analogue of this in the gradual limitation of names to narrower classes or to individuals as the result of carrying out certain processes of comparison and discrimination. Thus ‘ba-ba,’ which is used at first for a miscellaneous crowd of woolly or hairy quadrupeds, gets specialised as a name for a sheep, and the much-abused ‘papa’ becomes restricted to its rightful owner.

This process of differentiation and specialisation assumes an interesting form in a characteristic feature of the language-invention of both children and savages, viz., the formation of compound words. These compounds are often true metaphors. Thus in the case already quoted where an eye-lid was called an eye-curtain the child may be said to have resorted to a metaphorical way of describing the lid. It is much the same when M. at the age of one year nine months invented the expression ‘bwite (bright) penny’ for silver pieces. A slightly different example is the compound ‘foot-wing’ invented by the child C. to describe the limb of a seal. As a further variety of this metaphoric formation I may quote the pretty name ‘tell-wind’ which a boy of four years and eight months hit upon as a name for the weather-vane.

In these and similar cases, there is at once an analogical transference of meaning (e.g., from curtain to lid) or process of generalisation, and a limitation of meaning by the appended or qualifying word ‘eye’ and so a process of specialisation.

In certain cases the analogical extension gives place to what we should call a classification. One child for example, knowing the word steam-ship and wanting the name sailing-ship, invented the form ‘wind-ship’. The little girl M., when one year and nine months old, showed quite a passion for classing by help of compounds, arranging the rooms into ‘morner-room,’ ‘dinner-room’ (she was fond of adding ‘er’ at this time) and ‘nursery-room’.

It might be supposed from a logical point of view that in these inventions the qualifying or determining word would come more naturally after the generic name, as in the French moulin À vent, cygne noir. I have heard of one English child who used the form ‘mill-wind’ in preference to ‘wind-mill,’ and the order ‘dog black’ in preference to ‘black dog’. It would be worth while to note any similar instances.

In these inventions, again, we may detect a close resemblance between children’s language and that of savages. In presence of a new object a savage behaves very much as a child, he shapes a new name out of familiar ones, a name that commonly has much of the metaphorical character. Thus the Aztecs called a boat a ‘water-house’; and the Vancouver islanders when they saw a screw-steamer called it the ‘kick-kicket’.^[98]

A somewhat different class of word-inventions is that in which a child frames a new word on the analogy of known words. A common case is the invention of new substantives from verbs after the pattern of other substantives. The results are often quaint enough. Sometimes it is the agent who is named by the new word, as when the boy C. talked of the ‘Rainer,’ the fairy who makes rain, or when another little boy dubbed a teacher the ‘lessoner’. Sometimes it is the product of the action that is named, as when the same child C. and the deaf-mute Laura Bridgman both invented the form ‘thinks’ for ‘thoughts’. In much the same way a boy of three called the holes which he dug in his garden his ‘digs’. The reverse process, the formation of a verb from a substantive, also occurs. Thus one child invented the form ‘dag’ for striking with a dagger; and Preyer’s boy when two years and two months old formed the verb ‘messen’ to express cut from the substantive ‘messer’ (a knife). It was probably a similar process when the child M. at one year ten months, after seeing a motionless worm and being told that it was dead, asked to see another worm ‘deading’. The same child coined the neat verb-form ‘unparcel’. This readiness to form verbs from substantives and vice versÂ, which is abundantly illustrated in the development of language, is without doubt connected with the primitive and natural mode of thinking. The object is of greatest interest both to the child and to primitive man as an agent, or as the last stage or result of an action.

In certain of these original formations we may detect a fine feeling for verbal analogy. Thus a French boy, after killing the ‘limaces’ (snails) which were eating the plants in the garden, dignified his office by styling himself a ‘limarcier’; where the inventive faculty was no doubt led by the analogy of ‘voiturier’ formed from ‘voiture’.^[99]

In other verbal formations it is difficult to determine the model which is followed. Signorina Lombroso gives a good example. A little girl of two and a half years had observed that when her mother allowed her to take, eat, or drink something, she would say ‘prendilo’ (take it), ‘bevilo’ (drink it), or ‘mangialo’ (eat it). She proceeded to make a kind of adjective or substantive out of each of these, asking ‘É prendilo?’ ‘É bevilo?’ ‘É mangialo?’ i.e., ‘Is it takable or a case of taking?’ etc., when she wanted to take, drink, or eat something.^[100] By such skilful artifices does the little word-builder find his way to the names which he has need of.

In certain cases these original constructions are of a more clumsy order and due to a partial forgetfulness of a word and an effort to complete it. Thus a boy of four spoke of being ‘sorrified,’ where he was evidently led out of the right track by the analogy of ‘horrified’. The same little boy who talked of his ‘digs’ used the word ‘magnicious’ for ‘magnificent’. This is a choice example of word-transformation. No doubt the child was led by the feeling for the sound of this termination in other grand words, as ‘ambitious’. Possible, too, he might have heard the form ‘magnesia’ and been influenced by a reminiscence of this sound-complex. The talk of ‘Jeames’ with which Mr. Punch makes us acquainted is full of just such delightful missings of the mark in trying to reproduce big words.

Sentence-building.

We may now follow the child in his later and more ambitious linguistic efforts. The transition to this higher plane is marked by the use of the completed form of thought, the sentence.

At first, as already pointed out, there is no sentence-structure. The child begins to talk by using single words. These words consist of what we call substantives, as ‘Mamma,’ ‘nurse,’ ‘milk,’ a few adjectives, as ‘hot,’ ‘nice,’ ‘good,’ a still smaller number of adverbial signs, as ‘ta-ta,’ or ‘away,’ ‘over,’ ‘down,’ ‘up,’ and one or two verb-forms, apparently imperatives, as ‘go’. The exact order in which these appear, and the proportion between the different classes of constituents at a particular age, say two and a half or three, appear to vary greatly. Words descriptive of actions, though very few at first, appear to grow numerous in a later stage.^[101]

In speaking of these words as substantives, adjectives, and so forth, I am merely adopting a convenient mode of description. We must not suppose that the words as used in this simple disjointed talk have their full grammatical value. It is not generally recognised that the single-worded utterance of the child is an abbreviated sentence or ‘sentence-word’ analogous to the sentence-words found in the simplest known stage of adult language. As with the race so with the child, the sentence precedes the word. Moreover, each of the child’s so-called words in his single-worded talk stands for a considerable variety of sentence-forms. Thus the words in the child’s vocabulary which we call substantives do duty for verbs and so forth. As Preyer remarks, ‘chair’ (stuhl) means ‘There is no chair,’ ‘I want to be put in the chair,’ ‘The chair is broken,’ and so forth. In like manner ‘dow’ (down) may mean ‘The spoon has fallen down,’ ‘I am down,’ ‘I want to go down,’ etc.^[102] The particular shade of meaning intended is indicated by intonation and gesture.

This sentence-construction begins with a certain timidity. The age at which it is first observed varies greatly. It seems in most cases to be somewhere about the twenty-first month, yet I find good observers among my correspondents giving as dates eighteen and a half and nineteen months; and a friend of mine, a Professor of Literature, tells me that his boy formed simple sentences as early as fifteen months. We commonly have at first quite short sentences formed by two words in apposition. These may consist of what we should call an adjective added to and qualifying a substantive, as in the simple utterance of the child C., ‘Big bir’ (bird), or the exclamation, ‘Papa no’ (Papa’s nose); or they may arise by a combination of substantives, as in the sentence given by Tracy, ‘Papa cacker,’ i.e., ‘Papa has crackers,’ and one quoted by Preyer, ‘Auntie cake’ (German, ‘Danna Kuha,’ i.e., ‘Tante Kuche’) for ‘Auntie has given me cake’; and in a somewhat different example of a compound sentence also given by Preyer, ‘Home milk’ (German, ‘Haim Mimi’), interpreted as ‘I want to go home and have milk’. In the case of one child about the age of twenty-three months most of the sentences were composed of two words, one of which was a verb in the imperative. The love of commanding, so strong in the child, makes the use of the imperative, as is seen in this case, very common. M.’s first performance in sentence-building (at eighteen and a half months) was, ‘Mamma, tie,’ i.e., ‘tie gloves’.

Little by little the learner manages longer sentences, economising his resources to the utmost, troubling nothing about inflections or the insertion of prepositions so as to indicate precise relations, but leaving his hearer to discover his meaning as best he may; and it is truly wonderful how much the child manages to express in this rude fashion. A boy nineteen and a half months old gave this elaborate order to his father: ‘Dada toe toe ba,’ that is, ‘Dada is to go and put his toes in the bath’. Pollock’s little girl in the first essay at sentence-building, recorded at the age of twenty-one and a half months, actually managed a neat antithesis: ‘Cabs dati, clam clin,’ that is to say, ‘Cabs are dirty, and the perambulator is clean’. Preyer’s boy in the beginning of the third year brought out the following, ‘Mimi atta teppa papa oi,’ that is to say, ‘Milch atta Teppich Papa fui,’ which appears to have signified, “The milk is gone, it is on the carpet, and papa said ‘Fie’”. It may be added that the difficulties of deciphering these early sentences is aggravated by the frequent resort to slurs, as when a child says, ‘m’ out’ for ‘take me out,’ ‘’t on’ for ‘put it on’.

The order of words in these first tentative sentences is noticeable. Sometimes the subject is placed after the predicate, as in an example given by Pollock, ‘Run away man,’ i.e., ‘The man runs (or has run) away,’ and in the still quainter example given by the same writer, ‘Out-pull-baby ’pecs (spectacles),’ i.e., ‘Baby pulls or will pull out the spectacles’. In like manner the adjective used as predicate may precede the subject, as in the examples given by Maillet, ‘Jolie la fleur,’ etc.^[103] Sometimes, again, the object comes before the verb, as apparently in the following example given by Miss Shinn: a little girl delighted at the prospect of going out to see the moon exclaimed, “Moo-ky (sky), baby shee (see)”.^[104] Here is a delightful example of a transposition of subject and object. A boy two years and three months asked, ‘Did Ack (Alec) chocke an apple?’ i.e., ‘Did an apple choke Alec?’ though in this case we very probably have to do with a misunderstanding of the action choke. Other kinds of inversion occur when more complex experiments are attempted, as in connecting ‘my’ with an adjective. Thus one child said prettily, ‘Poor my friends’;^[105] which archaic form may be compared with the following Gallic-looking idiom used by M. at the age of one year ten months: ‘How Babba (baby, i.e., herself) does feed nicely!’ The same little girl put the auxiliary out of its place, saying, ‘Tan (can) Babba wite’ for ‘Baby can write,’ though this was probably a reminiscence of the question-form.

These inversions of our familiar order are suggestive. They have some resemblance to the curious order which appears in the spontaneous sign-making of deaf-mutes. Thus a deaf-mute answered the question, ‘Who made God?’ by saying, “God made nothing,” i.e., “nothing made God”. Similarly the deaf-mute Laura Bridgman expressed the petition, ‘Give Laura bread,’ by the form, ‘Laura bread give.’^[106] Such inversions, as we know, are allowable and common in certain languages, e.g., Latin. The study of the syntax of child-language and of the sign-making of deaf-mutes might suggest that our English order is not in certain cases the most natural one.

A somewhat similar inversion of what seems to us the proper order appears in the child’s first attempts at negation. The child C. early in his third year expressed the idea that he was not going into the sea thus: ‘N. (his own name) go in water, no’. Similarly Pollock’s child expressed acquiescence in a prohibition in this manner, ‘Baby have papa (pepper) no,’ where the ‘no’ followed without a pause. The same order appears in the case of French children, e.g., ‘Papa non,’ i.e., ‘It is not Papa,’ and seems to be a common, if not a universal form of the first half-spontaneous sentence-building. Here again we see an analogy to the syntax of deaf-mutes, who appear to append the sign of negation in a similar way, e.g., ‘Teacher I beat, deceive, scold no,’ i.e., ‘I must not beat, deceive, scold my teacher’. We see something like it, too, in the formations of savage-languages, as when ‘fool no’ comes to be the sign of ‘not fool,’ that is of wise.^[107] When ‘not’ comes into use it is apt to be put in a wrong place, as when the little girl M. said, ‘No Babba look’ (i.e., ‘Babba will not look’), and ‘Mr. Dill not did tum’ for ‘Mr. Gill did not come’.^[108]

Another closely related characteristic of this early childish sentence-building is the love of antithesis under the form of two balancing statements. Thus a child will often oppose an affirmative to a negative statement as a means of bringing out the full meaning of the former. The boy C., for example, would say, ‘This a nice bow-wow, not nasty bow-wow’. The little girl M. said, ‘Boo (the name of her cat) dot (got) tail; poor Babba dot no tail,’ proceeding to search for a tail under her skirts. This use of a negative statement by way of contrast or opposition to an affirmative grew in the case of one child aged two years and two months into a habit of description by negations. Thus an orange was described by the saying, ‘No, ’tisn’t apple,’ porridge by ‘No, ’tisn’t bread and milk’. It is interesting to note that deaf-mutes proceed in a similar fashion by way of antithetic negative statement. Thus one of these expressed the thought, ‘I must love and honour my teacher,’ by the order, ‘Teacher I beat, deceive, scold no!—I love honour yes!’^[109]

These first essays in the construction of sentences illustrate the skill of the child in eking out his scanty vocabulary by help of a metaphorical transference of meaning. Taine gives a charming example of this device. A little girl of eighteen months had acquired the word ‘Coucou’ as used by her mother or nurse when playfully hiding behind a door or chair, and the expression ‘Ça brÛle’ as employed to warn her that her dinner was too hot, or that she must put on her hat in the garden to keep off the hot sun. One day on seeing the sun disappear behind a hill she exclaimed, ‘A bÛle coucou’.^[110]

It is a fearful moment when the child first tries his hand at inflections, and, more especially in our language, those of verbs. Pollock’s child made the attempt, and successfully, at the age of twenty-two months. Such first essays are probably examples of pure imitation, the precise forms used having been previously heard from others. Hence while they show a growing power of thought, of a differencing of the relations of number and time, they do not involve verbal construction properly so called. This last appears as soon as the child carries over his knowledge of particular cases of verbal inflection and applies it to new words. This involves a nascent appreciation of the reason or rule according to which words are modified. The development of this feeling for the general mode of verbal change underlies all the later advance in correct speaking.

While the little explorer in the terra incognita of language can proceed safely in this direction up to a certain point he is apt, as we all know, to stumble now and again; nor is this to be wondered at when we remember the intricacies, the irregularities, which characterise a language like ours. In trying, for example, to manage the preterite of an English verb he is certain, as, indeed, is the foreigner, to go wrong. The direction of the error is often in the transformation of the weak to the strong form; as when ‘screamed’ becomes ‘scram,’ ‘split’ (preterite) ‘splat’ or ‘splut,’ and so forth. In other cases the child wall convert a strong into a weak form, as when Laura Bridgman, like many another child, would say, ‘I eated,’ ‘I seed,’ and so forth.^[111] Sometimes, again, delightful doublings of the past tense occur, as ‘sawed’ for ‘saw,’ ‘eatened’ for ‘eaten,’ ‘didn’t saw’ for ‘didn’t see,’ ‘did you gave me?’ for ‘did you give me?’ Active and passive forms are sometimes confused, as when M. said ‘not yike being picking up’ for ‘not like being picked up,’ etc. It is curious to note the different lines of imitative construction followed out in these cases.

One thing seems clear here: the child’s instinct is to simplify our forms, to get rid of irregularities. This is strikingly illustrated in the use of the heterogeneous assemblage of forms known as the verb ‘to be’. It is really hard on a child to expect him to answer the question, ‘Are you good now?’ by saying, ‘Yes, I am’. He says, of course, ‘Yes, I are’. Perhaps the poor verb ‘to be’ has suffered every kind of violence at the hands of children.^[112] Thus the child M. used the form ‘bed’ for ‘was’. Professor Max MÜller somewhere says that children are the purifiers of language. Would it not be well if they could become its simplifiers also, and give us in place of this congeries of unrelated sounds one good decent verb-form?

Other quaint transformations occur when the child begins to combine words, as when M. joining adverb to verb invented the form of past tense ‘fall downed’ for ‘fell down’. Another queer form is ‘Am’t I?’ used for ‘am I not?’ after the pattern of ‘aren’t we?’ An even finer linguistic stroke than this, is ‘Bettern’t you?’ for ‘Had you not better?’ where the child was evidently trying to get in the form ‘hadn’t you,’ along with the awkward ‘better,’ which seemed to belong to the ‘had,’ and solved the problem by treating ‘better’ as the verb, and dropping ‘had’ altogether.

A study of these solecisms, which are nearly always amusing, and sometimes daintily pretty, is useful to mothers and young teachers by way of showing how much hard work, how much of real conjectural inference, enters into children’s essays in talking. We ought not to wonder that they now and again slip; rather ought we to wonder that, with all the intricacies and pitfalls of our language—this applies of course with especial force to the motley irregular English tongue—they slip so rarely. As a matter of fact, the latter and more ‘correct’ talk—which is correct just because the child has stored up a good stock of particular word-forms, and consequently has a much wider range of pure uninventive imitation—is less admirable than the early inventive imitation; for this last not only has the quality of originality, but shows the germ of a truly grammatical feeling for the general types or norms of the language.

The English child is not much troubled by inflections of substantives. The pronouns, however, as intelligent mothers know, are apt to cause much heart-burning to the little linguist. The mastery of ‘I’ and ‘you,’ ‘me,’ ‘mine,’‘mine,’ etc., forms an epoch in the development of the linguistic faculty and of the power of thought which is so closely correlated with this. Hence it will repay a brief inspection.

As is well known, children begin by speaking of themselves and of those whom they address by names, as when they say, ‘Baby good,’ ‘Mamma come’. This is sometimes described as speaking “in the third person,” yet this is not quite accurate, seeing that there is as yet no distinction of person at all in the child’s language.

The first use of ‘I’ and ‘you’ between two and three years is apt to be erroneous. The child proceeds imitatively to use ‘I,’ ‘me,’ ‘my’ for ‘you’ and ‘your’. Thus one child said, ‘What I’m going to do,’ for, ‘What are you going to do?’ In this case, it is plain, there is no clear grasp of what we mean by subject, or of the exact relation of this subject to the person he is addressing.

Yet along with this mechanical repetition of the pronominal forms we see the beginnings of an intelligent use of them. So far as I can ascertain most children begin to say ‘me’ or ‘my’ before they say ‘you’. Yet I have met with one or two apparent exceptions to this rule. Thus the boy C. certainly seemed to get hold of the form of the second person before that of the first, and the priority of ‘you’ is attested in another case sent to me. It is desirable to get more observations on this point.

To determine the exact date at which an intelligent use of the first person appears, is much less easy than it looks. The ‘I’ is apt to appear momentarily and then disappear, as when M. at the age of nineteen months three weeks was observed to say ‘I did’ once, though she did not use ‘I’ again until some time afterwards. Allowing for these difficulties it may be said with some degree of confidence that the great transition from ‘baby’ to ‘I’ is wont to take place in favourable cases early in the first half of the third year. Thus among the dates assigned by different observers I find, twenty-four months, twenty-five months (cases given by Preyer), between twenty-five and twenty-six (Pollock), twenty-seven months (the boy C.). A lady friend tells me that her boy began to use ‘I’ at twenty-four months. In the case of a certain number of precocious children this point is attained at an earlier date. Thus Preyer quotes a case of a child speaking in the first person at twenty months. Schultze gives a case at nineteen months. A friend of mine, a Professor of English Literature, whose boy showed great precocity in sentence-building, reports that he used the forms ‘me’ and ‘I’ within the sixteenth month. Preyer’s boy, on the other hand, who was evidently somewhat slow in lingual development, first used the form of the first person ‘to me’ (mir) at the age of twenty-nine months.

The precise way in which these pronominal forms first appear is very curious. Many children use ‘me’ before ‘I’. Preyer’s boy appears to have first used the form ‘to me’ (mir). ‘My’ too is apt to appear among the earliest forms. In such different ways does the child pass to the new and difficult region of pronominal speech.

The meaning of this transition has given rise to much discussion. It is plain, to begin with, that a child cannot acquire these forms as he acquires the name ‘papa,’ ‘nurse,’ by a direct and comparatively mechanical mode of imitation. When he does imitate in this fashion he produces, as we have seen, the absurdity of speaking of himself as ‘you’. Hence during the first year or so of speech he makes no use of these forms. He speaks of himself as ‘baby’ or some equivalent name, others coming down to his level and setting him the example.

The transition seems to be due in part, as I have elsewhere pointed out, to a growing self-consciousness, to a clearer singling out of the ego or self as the centre of thought and activity, and the understanding of the other ‘persons’ in relation to this centre. Not that self-consciousness begins with the use of ‘I’. The child has no doubt a rudimentary self-consciousness when he talks about himself as about another object: yet the use of the forms ‘I,’ ‘me,’ may be taken to mark the greater precision of the idea of ‘self’ as not merely a bodily object and nameable just like other sensible things, but as something distinct from and opposed to all objects of sense, as what we call the ‘subject’ or ego.

While, however, we may set down this exchange of the proper name for the forms ‘I’ and ‘me’ as due to the spontaneous growth of the child’s intelligence, it is possible that education exerts its influence too. It is conjecturable that as a child’s intelligence grows, others in speaking to him tend unknowingly to introduce the forms ‘I’ and ‘you’ more frequently. Yet I am disposed to think that the child commonly takes the lead here. However this be, it is clear that growing intelligence, involving greater interest in others’ words, will lead to a closer attention to these pronominal forms as employed by others. In this way the environment works on the growing mind of the child, stimulating it to direct its thoughts to these subtle relations of the ‘me and not me,’ ‘mine and thine’. The more intelligent the environment the greater will be the stimulating influence: hence, in part at least, the difference of age when the new style of speech is attained.^[113]

The acquirement of these pronominal forms is a slow and irksome business. At first they are introduced hesitatingly, and alongside of the proper name; the child, for example, saying sometimes, ‘Baby’ or ‘Ilda,’ sometimes ‘I’ or ‘me’. In some cases, again, the two forms are used at the same time in apposition, as in the delightful form not unknown in older folk’s language, ‘Hilda, my book’. The forms ‘I’ and ‘me’ are, moreover, confined at first to a few expressions, as ‘I am,’ ‘I went,’ and so forth. The dropping of the old forms, as may be seen by a glance at the notes on the child C., and at Preyer’s methodical diary, is a gradual process.

Quaint solecisms mark the first stages of the use of these pronouns. As in the case of the earlier use of substantives, one and the same form will be used economically for a variety of meanings, as when ‘me’ was by the boy C. used to do duty for ‘mine’ also, and ‘us’ for ‘ours’. Here it is probable there is a lack of perfect discrimination. The connexion between the self and its belongings is for all of us of the closest. When a child of two, who was about to be deprived of her doll, shouted, ‘Me, me!’ may we not suppose that the doll was taken up into the inner circle of the self?^[114] Sometimes in this enrichment of the vocabulary by pronouns new and delightful forms are struck off, as when the little experimenter invents the possessive form ‘she’s’.

The perfect unfettered use of these puzzling forms comes much later. Preyer quotes a case in which a child Olga, aged four years, would say, ‘She has made me wet,’ meaning that she herself had done it. But this perhaps points to that tendency to split up the self into a number of personalities, to which reference was made in an earlier essay.

The third year, which witnesses the important addition of the pronouns, sees other refinements introduced. Thus the definite article was introduced in the case of Preyer’s boy in the twenty-eighth month, in that of an English boy at the age of two years eight months. Prepositions are introduced about the same time. In this way childish talk begins to lose its primitive disjointed character, and to grow into an articulated structure.^[115] Yet the perfect mastery of these takes time. A feeling for analogy easily leads the little explorer astray at first, as when the child M. said ‘far to’ after the model ‘near to’.

Through this whole period of language-learning the child continues to show his originality, his inventiveness. He is rarely at a loss, and though the gaps in his verbal acquisitions are great he is very skilful in filling them up. If, for example, our bright little linguist M., at the age of one year eight and a half months, after being jumped by her father, wants him to jump her mother also, she says, in default of the word ‘jump,’ “Make mamma high”. A boy of twenty-seven months ingeniously said, ‘It rains off,’ for ‘The rain has left off’. Forms are sometimes combined, as when a boy of three years three months used ‘my lone,’ ‘your lone,’ for ‘me alone’ or ‘by myself,’ ‘you alone’ or ‘by yourself’. Another girl, two years ten months, said, ‘No two ’tatoes left,’ meaning ‘only one potato is left’. Pleonasms occur in abundance, as when a boy of two would say, ‘Another one bicca (biscuit),’ and, better still, ‘another more’.

There is one part of this child’s work of learning our language of which I have said hardly anything, viz., the divining of the verbal content, of the meaning we put or try to put into our words. A brief reference to this may well bring this study of childish linguistics to a close.

The least attention to a child in the act of language-learning will show how much of downright hard work goes to the understanding of language. If we are to judge by the effort required we might say that the child does as much in deciphering his mother-tongue as an Oriental scholar in deciphering a system of hieroglyphics. Just think, for example, how many careful comparisons the small child-brain has to carry out, comparisons of the several uses of the word by others in varying circumstances, before he can get anything approaching to a clear idea, answering even to such seemingly simple words as ‘clean,’ ‘old’ or ‘clever’. The way in which inquiring children plague us with questions of the form, ‘What does such and such a word mean?’ sufficiently shows how much thought-activity goes in the trying to get at meanings. This difficulty, moreover, persists, reappearing in new forms as the child pushes his way onwards into the more tangled tracts of the lingual terrain. It is felt, and felt keenly, too, when most of the torments of articulation are over and forgotten. Many of us can remember how certain words haunted us as uncanny forms into the nature of which we tried hard, but in vain, to penetrate.

Owing to these difficulties the little learner is always drifting into misunderstanding of words. Such misapprehensions will arise in a passive way by the mere play of association in attaching the word especially to some striking feature or circumstance which is apt to present itself when the word is used in the child’s hearing. In this way, for example, general terms may become terribly restricted in range by the incorporation of accidentals into their meaning, as when a Sunday school scholar rendered the story of the good Samaritan by saying that a gentleman came by and poured some paraffin (i.e., oil) over the poor man. A word may have its meaning funnily transformed by such associative suggestions, as when a little girl, being told that a thing was a secret, remarked, ‘Well, mamma, ’ou (you) can whisper it in my ear’. As this example shows, a child in his ‘concreting’ fashion tries to get sensible realities out of our names. A mask was called by a boy of six a ‘grimace,’ this abstract name standing to his mind for the grinning face. A like tendency shows itself in the following quaint story. A boy and a girl, twins, had been dressed alike. Later on the boy was put into a ‘suit’. A lady asked the girl about this time whether they were not the twins, when she replied: ‘No, we used to be’. ‘Twin’ was inseparably associated in her mind with the similarity in dress. A somewhat similar effect of association of ideas is seen in the quaint request of the little girl M. that her mamma should ‘smell’ the pudding and make it cool. The action of bringing the face near an object yet so as not to touch it was associated with smelling, as in the little girl who, according to Mr. Punch, had her sense of propriety shocked by some irreverent person who did not “smell his hat” when he took his seat in church. Moral expressions get misunderstood in much the same manner. A little girl of three and a half years, pretending that her mother was her little girl, said: ‘You mustn’t do anything on purpose’. The usual verbal context of this highly-respectable phrase (e.g., ‘You did it on purpose’) had in the child’s mind given it a naughty meaning.

With these losings of the verbal road through associative by-paths may be taken the host of misapprehensions into which children are apt to fall through the ambiguities of our words and expressions, and our short and elliptical modes of speaking. Thus an American child, noting that children were ‘half price’ at a certain show, wanted his mother to get a baby now that they were cheap.^[116] With this may be compared the following: Jean Ingelow tells us she can well remember how sad she was made by her father telling her one day after dancing her on his knee that he must put her down as he ‘had a bone in his leg’.^[117] Much misapprehension arises, too, from our figurative use of language, which the little listener is apt to interpret in a very literal way. It would be worth knowing what odd renderings the child-brain has given to such expressions as ‘an upright man,’ ‘a fish out of water,’ and the like.

In addition to these comparatively passive misapprehensions there are others which are the outcome of an intellectual effort, the endeavour to penetrate into the mystery of some new and puzzling words or expression. Many of us have had our special horror, our bÊte noire among words, which tormented us for months and years. I remember how I was plagued by the word ‘wean,’ the explanation of which was very properly, no doubt, denied me by the authorities, and by what quaint fancies I tried to fill in a meaning.

As with words, so with whole expressions and sayings. It was a natural movement of childish thought when a little school-girl answered the question of the Inspector, ‘What is an average?’ by saying ‘What the hen lays eggs on’. She had heard her mother say, “The hen lays so many eggs ‘on the average’ every week,” and had no doubt imagined a little myth about this ‘average’. Again, most of us know what queer renderings the child-mind has given to Scripture language. Mr. James Payn tells us that he knew a boy who for years substituted for the words, ‘Hallowed be thy name,’ ‘Harold be thy name’.^[118] In this and similar cases it is not, as might be supposed, defective hearing—children hear words as a rule with great exactness—it is the impulse to give a familiar and significant rendering to what is strange and meaningless.^[119] A friend of mine when a boy was accustomed on hearing the passage, ‘If I say peradventure the darkness shall cover me,’ etc., to insert a pause after ‘peradventure,’ apprehending the passage in this wise: "If I say ‘Peradventure!’—the darkness," etc. In this way he turned the mysterious ‘peradventure’ into a mystic ‘open sesame,’ and added a thrilling touch of magic to the passage. My friend’s daughter tells me that on hearing the passage, “I ... visit the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, ... and show mercy unto thousands,” she construed the strange word ‘generation’ to mean an immense number like ‘billion,’ and was thus led to trouble herself about God’s seeming to be more cruel than kind.^[120]

In some cases, too, where the language is simple enough a child’s brain will find our meaning unsuitable and follow a line of interpretation of its own. Mr. Canton relates that his little heroine, who knew the lines in Strumpelpeter—

was told that she would catch a cold, and that she at once replied, “And will the doctor come and shook my head?”^[121] It was so much more natural to suppose that when the doctor came and did something this was carried out on the person of the patient.

There is nothing more instructive in this connexion than the talk of children among themselves about words. They build up quaint speculations about meanings, and try their hand bravely at definitions. Here is an example: A boy of five was instructing his comrade as to the puzzling word ‘home-sick’. He did it in quite a scientific fashion. “It’s like sea-sick, you know: you are sea-sick when you are sick at sea, and so you’re home-sick when you’re sick at home”.

There is something of this same desire to get behind words in children’s word-play, as we call it, their discovery of odd affinities in verbal sounds, and their punning. Though no doubt this contains a genuine element of childish fun, it betokens a more serious trait also, an interest in word-sounds as such, and a curiosity about their origin and purpose. It is difficult for grown-up people to go back in thought to the attitude of the child-mind towards verbal sounds. Just as children show ‘the innocence of the eye’ in seeing the colours of objects as they are and not as our habits of interpretation tend to make them, so they show an innocence of the ear, catching the intrinsic sensuous qualities of a word or a group of words, in a way which has become impossible for us.

This half-playful, half-serious scrutiny of word-sounds leads to the attempt to find by analysis and analogy a familiar meaning in strange words. For example, a little boy about four years old heard his mother speak of nurse’s neuralgia, from which she had been suffering for some time. He thereupon exclaimed, ‘I don’t think it’s new ralgia, I call it old ralgia’. A child called his doll ‘Shakespeare’‘Shakespeare’ because its spear-like legs could be shaken. Another boy of three explained ‘gaiters’ as things ‘to go out of the gate with’. Another said that the ‘Master’ which he prefixed to his name meant that he was master of his dog. A little girl in her third year called ‘anchovies’ ‘ham-chovies’‘ham-chovies’ ‘mermaid’ ‘worm-maid,’ ‘whirlwind’ ‘world-wind,’ ‘gnomes’ ‘no-mans’ (un-menschen), taking pleasure apparently in bringing some familiar element—even when this seems to other ears at least not very explanatory—into the strange jumble of word-sound that surrounded her. A child may know that he is ‘fooling’ in such cases, yet the word-play brings a certain satisfaction, which is at least akin to the pleasure of the older linguist.

This quasi-punning transformation of words is curiously like what may be called folk-etymology, where a foreign word is altered by a people so as to be made to appear significant and suitable for its purpose, as in the oft-quoted forms ‘sparrow grass’ (asparagus) and ‘cray-fish’ (from the French Écrevisse, cf. the O. H. German Krebiz), where the attempt to suit the form to the thing is still more apparent.^[122] When, for example, a boy calls a holiday a ‘hollorday,’ because it is a day ‘to holloa in,’ we may say that he is reflecting the process by which adults try to put meaning into strange words, as when a cabman I overheard a few days ago spoke about putting down ashphalt (for ‘asphalt’). Some children carry out such transformation and invention of derivation on a large scale, often resorting to pretty myths, as when the butterflies are said to make butter, or to eat butter, grasshoppers to give grass, honeysuckles to yield all the honey, and so forth.^[123]

A child will even go further, and, prying into the forms of gender, invent explanatory myths in which words are personified and sexualised. Thus a little boy of five years and three months who had learned German and Italian as well as English was much troubled about the gender of the sun and moon. So he set about myth-making on this wise: “I suppose people^[124] think the sun is the husband, the moon is the wife, and all the stars the little children, and Jupiter the maid”. A German girl of six was thus addressed by her teacher: “‘Der’ ist mÄnnlich; Was sind ‘Die’ und ‘Das’?” To which she replied prettily: "Die ist dÄmlich (i.e., ‘ladyish’) und das ist kindlich". The tendency to attribute differences of sex and age to names observable in this last is seen in other ways. An Italian child asked why ‘barba’ (beard) was not called ‘barbo’. With this may be compared the pretty myth of another Italian child that ‘barca’ (boat) was the little girl of ‘barcainolo’ (boatman).^[125]

One other characteristic feature in the child’s attitude towards words must be touched on, because it looks like the opposite of the impulse to tamper with words just dealt with. A child is a great stickler for accuracy in the repetition of all familiar word-forms. The zeal of a child in correcting others’ language, and the comical errors he will now and again fall into in exercising his pedagogic function, are well known to parents. Sometimes he shows himself the most absurd of pedants. ‘Shall I read to you out of this book, baby?’ asked a mother of her boy, about two and a half years old. ‘No,’ replied the infant, ‘not out of dot book, but somepy inside of it.’ The same little stickler for verbal accuracy, when his nurse asked him, ‘Are you going to build your bricks, baby?’ replied solemnly, ‘We don’t build bricks, we make them and then build with them’. In the notes on the boy C. we find an example of how jealously the child-mind insists on the ipsissima verba in the recounting of his familiar stories.

Are these little sticklers for verbal correctness, who object to everything figurative in our language, who, when they learn that a person or an animal has ‘lost his head,’ take the expression literally, and who love nothing better than tying us down to literal exactness, themselves given to ‘word-play’ and verbal myth-making, or have we here to do with two varieties of childish mind? My observations do not enable me to pronounce on this point.

I have in this essay confined myself to some of the more common and elementary features of the child’s linguistic experience. Others present themselves when the reading stage is reached, and the new strange stupid-looking word-symbol on the printed page has to do duty for the living sound, which for the child, as we have seen, seems to belong to the object and to share in its life. But this subject, tempting as it is, must be left. And the same must be said of those special difficulties and problems which arise for the child-mind when two or more languages are spoken. This is a branch of child-linguistics which, so far as I know, has never been explored.

62. The nature of gesture, its relation to language proper, and its prevalence in infancy, among imbecile children, deaf-mutes, etc., are discussed by Romanes, Mental Evolution in Man, chap. vi.