Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 61.djvu/53

Rh these words off with the daily noted new words, we found we should have missed some 250 words had we used only the method of noting new words. Thus any attempt to write out a child's vocabulary from memory or from spasmodic observations is utterly untrustworthy. So in spite of the extreme cases of children's use of words (from 25 to 1,100 at two years in the published cases), the average of 257 for the dozen children reported in Tracy's 'Psychology of Childhood,' pp. 142-144, seems only from a half to a third of the correct amount. For, even if we allow these to have been all cases of first children, the absence of any description of the method makes it probable that the easier and less complete methods were used. For the average of the first eight summaries of vocabularies at two years in Preyer ('Seele des Kindes,' 4te Aufl. 1895, S., 378) is 419, to which our first child's record corresponds. The child studied by Prof. Humphrey's thorough, though in some ways questionable, dictionary method had a vocabulary of 1,121 words. The child studied by G. Deville's method had a vocabulary of 739 words, which corresponds almost exactly with our younger children's records of 729 and 741. If then an average child at two years uses from 400 to 800 words, can we believe without some real evidence that any adult uses only the fabled 300?

The total number of words used on one day is to many people even more astonishing than the number of different words. For the child's energy represented in the production of 8,992 or 9,290 words is something relatively enormous. Would that this child energy could be expressed in figures! But here again some idea of what a speech 'record' is, can be obtained from the case of the above Carl A., who used on his second birthday—i.e., when six months younger than our children—a total of 10,507 words!

In the number of repetitions of a single word one gets a measure, too, of the energy used; as on finding that our 2 (b.) used his own name 'Sammy' 1,057 times on one day (as subject, object and possessive, in place of the personal pronouns); while 3 (g.) used her favorite 'little' 660 times, 'that' 609 times and the aggressive ego words, 'I,' 'me' and 'my' 970 times.