Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/455

Rh As I have dwelt at some length on children's defective articulation, I should like to say that their early performances, so far from being a discredit to them, are very much to their credit. I, at least, have often been struck with the sudden bringing forth without any preparatory trial of difficult combinations, and with a wonderful degree of accuracy. Indeed, the precision which a child, even in the second year, will often give to our vocables is quite surprising, and reminds me of the admirable exactness which, as I have observed, other strangers to our language, and more especially perhaps Russians, introduce into their articulation, putting our own loose treatment of our language to the blush. This precision, acquired without, as it would seem, any tentative practice, points, I suspect, to a good deal of silent rehearsal, nascent graspings of muscular actions, which are not carried far enough to produce sound.

The gradual development of the child's articulative powers, as represented partly by the precision of the sounds formed, as also by their differentiation and multiplication, is a matter of great interest. At the beginning, when 'the child is able to reproduce only a small portion of a vocable, there is, of course, but little differentiation. Thus it has been remarked by more than one observer that one and the same sound (so far, at least, as our ears can judge) will stand for different lingual signs, "ba" standing in the case of one child for both basket and sheep ("ba," lamb), and "bo" for box and bottle. Little by little the sounds grow differentiated into a more definite and perfect form; and it is curious to note the process of gradual evolution by which the first rude attempt at articulate form gets improved and refined. Thus writes a mother: "At eighteen to twenty months 'milk' was 'gink,' at twenty-one months it was 'ming,' and at soon after two years it was a sound between 'mik' and 'milk.'" The same child, in learning to say "lion," went through the stages "un" (one year and eight months), "ion" (two years), and "lion" (two years and eight months). Again, to quote one of Preyer's examples, "grosspapa" (grandpapa) began as "opapa," this passed into "gropapa," and this again into "grosspapa." In another case given by Schultze the word "wasser" (pronounced "vasser") went through the following stages: first, "vavaff"; second, "fafaff"; third, "vaffvaff"; "fourth, "vasse"; and fifth, "vasser." In this last we have an interesting illustration of a struggle between the imitative impulse to reproduce the exact sound and the impulse to reduplicate or repeat the sound, this last being very apparent in the introduction of the second v and the ff in the first stage, in the substitution of the f's for v's under the influence of the dominant final sound in the second stage. The student of the early stages of language-growth might, one imagines, find many