STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. 439 



As I have dwelt at some length on children's defective articu- 

 lation, 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 trial of difficult combinations, and with a 

 wonderful degree of accuracy. Indeed, 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 espe- 

 cially perhaps Russians, introduce into their articulation, putting 

 our own loose treatment of our language to the blush. This pre- 

 cision, acquired without, as it would seem, any tentative practice, 

 points, I suspect, to a good deal of silent rehearsal, nascent grasp- 

 ings of muscular actions, which are not carried far enough to 

 produce sound. 



The gradual development of the child's articulative powers, as 

 represented partly by the precision of the sounds formed, as also 

 by their differentiation and multiplication, is a matter of great 

 interest. At the beginning, when ' the child 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 ob- 

 server that one and the same sound (so far, at least, as our ears 

 can judge) will stand for 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 sounds grow 

 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 at 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 

 and eight months), " ion " (two years), and " lion " (two years and 

 eight months). Again, to quote one of Preyer's examples, " gross- 

 papa " (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: first, "vavaff"; second, "fafaff"; third, 

 " vaffvaff " ; " fourth, " vasse " ; and fifth, " vasser." In this last 

 we have an interesting illustration of a struggle between the imi- 

 tative 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 -y and the jf in the first stage, in 

 the substitution of the/'s for i;'s under the influence of the domi- 

 nant final sound in the second stage. The student of the early 

 stages of language-growth might, one imagines, find many sug- 



