O'Shea—The Child's Linguistic Development. 179 
treatment Tracy lias calculated that of five thousand four hun¬ 
dred words employed by twelve children from nineteen to thirty 
months of age, and reported by several investigators, 60 per cent 
are nouns, 20 per cent are verbs, 9. per cent are adjectives, 5 per 
cent are adverbs, 2 per cent are prepositions, 1.7 per cent are 
interjections, and 0.3 per cent are conjunctions. 
Nov/, it will be apparent upon a little reflection that this 
method of treating the child's vocabulary is quite external and 
artificial. The classification is based upon what may be called 
the structure of words viewed ah extra , rather than upon their 
function in the child's expression. Tracy, and all who use his 
method, take a formal or logical or grammatical, not a pyscho- 
logical point of view. To illustrate the principle in question, 
when K, at eleven months, says ha (hat), she always sees the 
object and thrusts her arms toward it, indicating plainly enough 
that she wishes to reach it. The word, if her mutilated copy 
can be dignified by such a term, is uttered in an impulsive or 
perhaps interjectional way; and all her expressions show that 
she has active desires with reference to the thing designated. 
She is not simply naming it in any formal, logical, or purely 
denotative manner. Looked at from this standpoint the word 
is seen to be more than a mere noun; it does duty for an entire 
sentence in a highly generalized form. 1 It is the : * undifferen¬ 
tiated linguistic protoplasm” out of which in due course various 
sentential organs and members will make their appearance, ac¬ 
cording to some such general method of differentiation, possibly, 
as a complex animal organism like the chick, for instance, grows 
out of the undifferentiated germ cell contained in the egg. So 
far as I can make out, K employs her word ha (and I speak of 
this as typical of all the words she uses at eleven months), to 
convey the notion, “I want that hat;” or “Take me to the 
iCompare, among others. Sully: Studies of Childhood, p. 171; Lu- 
kens: Preliminary Report on the Learning of Language, Ped. Sem., 
Vol. Ill, p. 453-455; Dewey: The Psychology of Infant Language, Psy¬ 
chol. Rev., Vol. I, pp. 63-66; Egger: Observations et re-flexions sur le 
development de Vintelligence et du language chez. les enfants, Paris 
1877; H. Ament: Die Entwiclcelung von Sprechen und DenTcen beim 
Einde (Leipzig, 1899), p. 163; Meumann: Die Enstehung der ersten 
Wortbedeut ungen beim Einde (Leipzig, 1902), p. 31. 
