Laws and Hypotheses for Behavior 255 



that even looks like direct imitation until the child has 

 'learned' at least forty or fifty words. 



The second difficulty lies in the fact that different chil- 

 dren, in even the clearest cases of the imitation of one 

 sound, vary from it in so many directions. A list of all the 

 sounds made in response to one sound heard is more sug- 

 gestive of random babble as modified by various habits of 

 duplicating sounds, than of a direct potency of the model. 

 Ten children of the same age may, in response to ' Christ- 

 mas,' say, kiss, kissus, krismus, mus, kim, kimus, kiruss, 

 i-us and even totally unlike vocables such as hi-yi or ya-ya. 



The third difficulty is that in those features of word- 

 sounds which are hard to acquire, such as the *th' sound, 

 direct imitation is inadequate. The teacher has recourse to 

 trial and chance success, the spoken word serving as a model 

 to guide satisfaction and discomfort. In general no sound 

 not included in the instinctive babble of children seems to be 

 acquired by merely hearing and seeing it made. 



A fourth difficulty is that by the doctrine of direct imi- 

 tation it should not be very much more than two or three 

 times as hard to repeat a two- or three-syllable series as to 

 repeat a single syllable. It is, in fact, enormously harder. 

 This is, of course, just what is to be expected if learning a 

 sound means the selection from random babbling plus pre- 

 vious habits. If, for instance, a child makes thirty mono- 

 syllabic sounds like pa, ga, ta, ma, pi, gi, li, mi, etc., there 

 is, by chance, one chance in thirty that in response to a 

 word or phrase he will make that one-syllable sound of his 

 repertory which is most like it, but there is only one chance 

 in nine hundred that he will make that two-syllable combina- 

 tion of his repertory which is most like it. 



On the other hand, two objections will be made to the op- 

 posite view that the word spoken acts only as a model to 



