746 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



is mamma ? " lie will look about the room until lie finds the familiar 

 face. He has now taken his first step in acquiring speech, he has 

 learned the meaning of a word. The second step follows after a 

 time. From time immemorial in the baby's experience he has 

 been able to cry, and he knows it ; in other words, he is aware of 

 the fact that it is one of his native powers to make a noise. By 

 and by it begins to occur to him that this sound, " mamma," is also 

 a noise, and some day, probably by accident, as he is being cruelly 

 shaken up by being trotted on some one's knee, he emits a sound 

 like " mamma." If he is a bright baby — and whose baby is not ? — 

 he notices the similarity between the sound he has made and the 

 sound he has already learned. Such attempts at saying " mamma " 

 usually meet with considerable active encouragement of an agree- 

 able kind, and he naturally repeats the attempt. After many 

 failures it is a success, and he has at last acquired a memory of 

 the exact effort in certain muscles of lips and tongue needed to 

 produce the sound, and has also associated that memory of effort 

 with the memory of the sound which in time is joined to the 

 memory of the mother's face. And now the second process is 

 complete, and the baby knows how to say the word intelligently ; 

 for intelligent speech is speech based upon an association of ideas. 

 Of course, as the child grows, he subsequently adds a visual pict- 

 ure of the word " mamma " to the auditory picture when he learns 

 to read ; and a manual-effort memory to the speech-effort memory 

 when he learns to write. When all these four memories are 

 acquired and associated, he has acquired the use of language. 



Now, what is true of this simple word has been true of every 

 other word which we make use of ; and, though we can not recall 

 this process which we have been through, we can see it going on 

 about us. If you wish to study it carefully, study children, by the 

 aid of Preyer's interesting book, " The Mind of the Child." * Or 

 if you wish to observe the process more directly, recall the manner 

 in which you have acquired a foreign language, for that is done 

 in the same way, if the natural method is followed. Suppose that 

 you are told that in German the brain is called Gehirn — that it is 

 pronounced gayheern, and spelled g-e-h-i-r-n. If you are not famil- 

 iar with German, you have now a new word-image connected 

 with the mental image of the brain much more easily acquired 

 than was the word " mamma " when you learned it, but nevertheless 

 acquired in the same way. 



Whether we think, then, in mental images or in language, 

 the process is the same ; it is consciousness playing along certain 

 lines of association to and fro between definite memory -pictures. 

 These memory-pictures have been acquired through the senses, 



* The practical application of this knowledge is made by Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, in 

 an article on " Language in Education," " American Journal of Psychology," vol. ii, No. 1. 



