Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 61.djvu/57

Rh one can see how the compound words came into use later on together with the finer specialization, shown also in the more exact adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, etc.

Thus, too, many equally easy words come to be used much later when they become useful or interesting, as mat, muff, people, joke, note, lace, veil, care, screw, bone, gas, glue, guess, give, fill, feed, tell, buy, shine, scrub, sure, like and soft. On the other hand, long hard words are used when the child's interests need them, used, however, in the modified shape of the nearest imitative sound the child can make or of some original substitute word. Thus they associated some sound which served as a word for nigger-book, handkerchief, petticoat, toboggan, umbrella, Brille, hammock, Brightwood, university, perfumery, Bauchknopf, apple-sauce, rocking-chair, dein ist mein Herz, chimney-sweep, Pantoffeln, peppermint-candy, waste-paper basket, Miss Haversham, David Copperfield, Thomas Orchestra, Beethoven, Brahms, button-hole scissors, magnifying glass, Kohlpechrabenschwarzermohr (in which 2 (b.) only left out the two syllables en and er); telephone, vaccinate, be reposed, collapse, Headerei (to be carried on one's shoulders, originated themselves from Washerei), kitzeln, remember, disturb; comfortable, precious, old-fashioned; day after to-morrow, guten Morgen, guten Abend, auf Wiedersehen.

We believe then that the acquisition of words by a child is mainly accounted for by the psychological laws of pleasure-pain, viz.: (1) the biological law that whatever is favorable or more immediately beneficial to our organism is pleasurable and that the harmful is painful; (2) between these extreme limits things are further differentiated as pleasurable or painful by being associated with things already differentiated by the biological law, and this principle of association comes indirectly under (1); (3) by the habit or custom principle whereby we come to have pleasure in anything long-continued about us—supposing it is not so immediately harmful as to kill us in the process of adaptation.

Words then are simply the tools whereby the child gets more pleasures and avoids more pains. And the number of these words is normally limited only by the pleasure-pains which are of sufficient intensity to make the motor connections for speaking the words. We have many observations showing how this association of the sound with the thing was made without any apparent attention to the sound; so that when the child's pleasure-pain interest in the thing was enough for it to want to use the word, out it popped without any previous trial or practice. If the child merely lives in an environment where the words are heard or—later on—seen in books, the words get themselves ready for use when needed.