50 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



right, — Yes. M., S. want those two pieces paper, — give S. some paper. S. 

 have to roll up. M. cover S. Where P.? Where P.? M., where P.? M. 

 sing loud. M. lie down on P. bed," 



when the Mannlein suddenly fell off to sleep. 



How considerably the range of a child's interests can vary even in 

 substantially the same environment can be seen by a comparison of the 

 entire vocabularies of our three children. For out of the 2,170 differ- 

 ent words used by some one of the three up to two and a half years of 

 age, less than a quarter, 489, were used by all; while 2 (b.) used 480 

 and 3 (g.) used 586 words that were not used by either of the other 

 children. The varying interests in these cases are partly due to the 

 difference in sex. But in the case of Professor Holden's two girls, 

 whom he expressly says were exposed to surroundings as similar as was 

 possible, we find at two years of age 246 words in common, while the 

 older had used 241 and the younger 154 exclusively.* These wide 

 individual differences in the stock of words children use seem to us on 

 examining the complete vocabularies in chronological order to be much 

 better accounted for by the varying pleasure-pains or interests of the 

 children than by the oft-quoted law of the ease of utterance, f 



For though the stock in common is on the whole the easier and the 

 individual variations are toward the harder, yet the short words with 

 their easier initial or imitative sounds seem to be used because of their 

 uecessity or interest to the child's life, as, e. g., the early words baby, 

 cow, Papa, Mama, book, horse, dog, bottle, water, doll, pin, mittens; 

 burn, see, take, want, eat, wash; pretty, hot, dirty, warm, broken, 

 clean, sticky, another, there, off, away, quickly; good-bye, hurrah, 

 peek-a-boo, etc., etc. The growth of language in the race has brought 

 it about that the words most necessary to the child's life are the 

 shorter and easier sounds. Thus the child uses them first because of 

 their interest and serviceableness, and not because of their ease. So 

 glancing down the chronological columns of our children's vocabularies, 



* Holden : ' On the Vocabularies of Children under Two Years of Age,' 

 Trans. Amer. Philological Assn., Vol. 8, 1877, pp. 58-68. 



t See Schultze, 'Die Sprache des Kindes ' (1880), S. 27, for the use of this 

 principle in the sounds used by the child for words. But Holden had already 

 applied this principle to the words which the child successively used and thus 

 made up his vocabulary. " I am inclined to take it as a result of my inquiry 

 that the ease of pronunciation, far more than the complexity of the idea, deter- 

 mines the adoption of the word" (ibid. p. 60). But of this principle Hum- 

 phrey said : " Although it had some influence before the child was one year old, 

 when she was two, it had ceased to have any effect whatever. She had, by that 

 time, adopted certain substitutes for letters which she could not pronounce, 

 and words containing these letters she employed as freely as if the substitutes 

 had been the correct sounds" (ibid., p. 7). For Preyer's arguments against 

 the principle in both its applications to the sounds and to the real words see 

 his pp. 367, 373 and 374. 



