438 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



This being so, tlie reason why a child imitates some of our lan- 

 guage sounds correctly, others not, is somewhat doubtful. Thus 

 it may arise because the articulatory apparatus has lost a part of 

 its primordial skill ; or because among the sounds which have to 

 be reproduced and which prompt and guide the articulatory 

 movements, some are better singled out and remembered than 

 others ; or again, because, owing to the unequal frequency of oc- 

 currence of certain sounds, the central nervous connections and 

 corresponding mental association involved are established more 

 quickly in the case of certain sounds than of others. It seems to 

 be commonly held that the first is at all events the main reason, 

 and this conclusion is supported by the fact that all children 

 alike appear to find certain sounds (the labials) easy and others 

 difiicult. At the same time it is pretty certain that the environ- 

 ment lends material help in determining unknowingly what 

 sounds shall be first grasped and reproduced. It may be added 

 that the child's preferential interest in certain sounds and sound 

 combinations, as well as in certain objects, as nurse, the dog, 

 which it especially wants to name, plays a subordinate part in de- 

 termining the common order of lingual progress as well as its 

 variations in the case of different children. A lady writes to say 

 that she is often surprised at the appearance of difficult sound 

 combinations in the talk of her boy. When twenty -two months 

 old he mastered the formidable task of saying "scissors," no 

 doubt, as she remarks, owing to the special interest he had de- 

 veloped about this time in cutting up paper. 



As already suggested, the liberties which the child allows him- 

 self in using our speech are of philological interest. The subject 

 has been touched on by more than one writer. The phonetic re- 

 ductions, substitutions, and transpositions of baby -language ap- 

 pear to have their counterpart in the changes which go on in the 

 history of languages. Thus M. Egger points out that when a 

 child says " crop " for " trop," " cravailler " for " travailler," he is 

 reproducing the change which Latin words have undergone in 

 becoming French, as when " tremere " is transmuted into " crain- 

 dre." Pollock reminds us that when his daughter uses d for the 

 unmanageable r, she is reversing the process by which the Ben- 

 galee transforms the Sanskrit d into an r sound. The reduplica- 

 tions again, and the use of certain final syllables, as the caressing 

 diminutive "ie," appear to reflect habits of adult language. A 

 further working out of those analogies belongs to the sciences of 

 phonetics and linguistics.* 



* Children's defective pronunciation has been elaborately compared by Preyer with ab- 

 normal speech defects {op. cit., 18 cap.). There seems, no doubt, to be a certain resemblance 

 between the two ; yet Preyer's attempts to show a complete parallelism are somewhat forced. 



