THP: conflict ok LANCrUAGKS. 1 27 



molhcr. Her voice first responds to his and soothes or stirs 

 his emotions. His wants and pains correlate themselves with 

 the tones and accents of her voice and to these again his own 

 cries accord. Thus, by constant imitation and repetition, sound 

 and sense become associated in his mind. This is the begin- 

 ning of the acquisition of the vernacular. As the child's 

 intelligence develops, meanings and their associated sounds 

 become more certain and definite, and his intellectual growth 

 largely consists in working up to and into the more exact 

 import of words and phrases which he has already understood 

 vaguely but sufficiently for childish purposes. 



An important feature of this process of language acquisi- 

 tion lies in the relative order in which grammar and vocabulary 

 are mastered. The traditional notion is that the learner 

 acquires first a small homely vocabulary and then the gram- 

 matical machinery by which these words may be put together 

 to express a proposition. But in fact the process is compound : 

 it is equally as much analytic as synthetic. Observation of 

 the child shows that he learns by phrases, and that even what 

 we term words are first used by him as phrases. His mind at 

 this early stage of development has no use for mere nouns or 

 names or adjectives. He only thinks of milk as something he 

 likes or wants and to him the word is associated with liking 

 or wanting rather than with the thing itself. The names he 

 hears associated with objects around him he applies, self cen- 

 tred as he is, to his relations to the objects. Later in the pro- 

 cess of language acquisition he analyses the thought and the 

 sound into verbal, adjective and nominal elements and shifts 

 his words to one or another of these particular uses. 



But the most remarkable fact is the child's early mastery 

 of the vernacular grammar. Grammar is an expression of 

 generalization and abstraction, and the child's early blunders 

 show his progress in this process. Oxes for o.\r// and ^^oec/ 

 for 7er?/t show his acquisition of the English grammatical 

 notions of the pluralizing \ and the preterit d. His misappli- 

 cation of the forms in these cases is a credit to his linguistic 



