Page:First steps in mental growth (1906).djvu/48

 instinctive and emotional vocal expression of the infant stand to articulate speech.

It is often said, and truly, very probably, that an adult's speech does not contain a single sound which was not uttered many times in infancy. It may be said with equal certainty that the elements of all adult hand-movements are to be found in infantile hand-movements of the first year. So when one undertakes to trace to its beginnings a movement like throwing a ball, turning a door-knob, or scribbling with a pencil one gets lost in a tangle of random, reflexive and instinctive hand-movements.

In the second place, all of the acquired movements enumerated below, with possibly two exceptions, originate in imitative behavior, and are mastered by the method of trial and success. For example, the child sees an older person grasp the door-knob and open the door, and begins imitatively to work at the knob, pulling, tugging, twisting and turning it as well as he can. Sometimes the tugging at the knob is in order to open the door to get out of the room; sometimes without any other purpose than to do in a general way what the child sees another person doing. If, in either case, the door is unlatched, the success, designed or accidental, becomes a new stimulus to pulling, tugging, twisting, fumbling at the knob. No doubt imitation often enters as a factor in guiding the learning process, but its most important function, at the outset, is to set the motion going.

The list of hand-movements which follows includes