no THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA 



plavn:ates. It was not until she was 40 months old and her imagina- 

 tion began to be active that she found her means of communication 

 inadequate. So long as she staid on a material basis she could 

 make herself understood with her meager stock of words helped 

 out by gesture, tone of voice and the intelligence of adults, but 

 when she wished to share intellectual experience she found herself 

 seriously hampered. 



As to the origin of her vocabulary, 22 o£ the 41 entirely dif- 

 ferent words are clearly imitations of English (although half of 

 them have a baby pronunciation) and four are probably derived 

 from English (the two "va's," the preposition "ker," and "ha."). 

 Eleven words are imitations of sounds, most of them learned from 

 her parents and not from the respective animals. Four terms 

 may be original expressions, i. e., "er," "un," "er-her" and "han," 

 the two latter perhaps being crystallizations of baby expressions that 

 were originally meaningless but happened so often to be used in 

 certain situations that they came to function as words for her. Three 

 more of these original expressions took on definite meanings during 

 her 37th month. 



In her 38th month she at last became willing to talk like other 

 people. From her 33rd to 36th month she added but 2 words 

 a month to .her vocabulary, in her 38th month she added 27 ; the 

 next, 44, the next, 128, and in her 41st month 257 or 8 a day; this, I 

 believe, is the record for rapid learning so far as published cases" 

 go. At four she had a vocabulary of 1135 words; twenty-five times 

 the size of her three year vocabulary ; a month before this she used 

 10511 words in one day (6). A few of her queer expressions lasted 

 until her 47th month but most of them had disappeared by her 42nd 

 month. 



There are two conclusions which may be drawn from, a study of 

 this child's retarded speech development. 



1. Most children learn through imitation to talk earlier than 

 they need to. 



2. With this child speech was not primarily for communica- 

 tion but largely a matter of self-expression. 



Bibliography 



1. FJeyer, T. P. 1916. The Vocabulary of Three years. Ed. 

 Rev., Dec., pp. 478-489. 



2. Jegi, J. I., ISOl. The Vocabulary of a Two-Year-Old Child. 

 Child Study Mo. VI., pp. 241-261. 



3. Nice, M. M. 1915. The Development of^a Child's Vocabu- 

 lary in Relation to Environment. Ped. Sem., XXII, pp. 35-64. 



