Along with such lame omissions we have the more vigorous procedure of

substitutions. In certain cases there seems little if any kinship

between the sounds or the articulatory actions by which they are

produced. At the early stage more particularly almost any manageable

sound seems to do duty as substitute. The early-acquired labials,

including the labio-dental _f_ come in as serviceable ‘hacks’ at this

stage. What we call lisping is indeed exemplified in this class of

infantile substitutions. Children have been observed to say ‘fank’ for

‘thank’ and ‘mouf’ for ‘mouth,’ ‘feepy’ for ‘sleepy,’ ‘poofie’ for

‘pussy,’ ‘wiver’ for ‘river,’ ‘Bampe’ for ‘Lampe’ (German). The dentals,

too, _d_ and _t_, are turned to all kinds of vicarious service. Thus we

find ‘ribbon’ rendered by ‘dib,’ ‘gum’ by ‘dam,’ ‘Greete’ (German) by

‘Deete,’ ‘Gummi’ (German) by ‘Dummi,’ ‘cut’ by ‘tut,’ and ‘klopfen’

(German) by ‘topfen’. Similarly ‘gee-gee’ (horse), which oddly enough

was first rendered by the child M. as ‘dee-gee,’ is altered to

‘dee-dee’. I find too that new sounds are apt to be put to this

miscellaneous use. Thus one child after learning the aspirate (_h_) at

two years not only brought it out with great emphasis in its proper

place but began to use it as a substitute for other and unmanageable

sounds. Thus he would say, ‘hie down on hofa’ for ‘lie down on sofa’.

The aspirate is further used in place of _sh_, as when ‘shake’ was

rendered by ‘hate,’ and of _st_, as when Preyer’s boy called ‘Stern’

‘Hern’. In other cases we see that the little linguist is trying to get

as near as possible to the sound, and such approximations are an

interesting sign of progress. Thus in one case ‘chatterbox’ was rendered

by ‘jabberwock,’ in another case ‘dress’ by ‘desh,’ in another (Preyer’s

boy), ‘Tisch’ (German) by ‘Tiss’.[82]

-----

Footnote 82:

I find according to the notes sent me that the sounds _s_ and _sh_

develop unequally in the cases of different children. Some acquire

_s_, others _sh_ before the other.

-----

Besides omissions and substitution of sounds, occasional insertions are

said to occur. According to one set of observations _r_ may be inserted

after the broad _a_, as when ‘pocket’ was rendered by ‘barket’. A

cockney is apt to do the same, as when he talks of having a ‘barth’

(bath). Yet this observation requires to be verified.

These alterations of articulate sound by the child remind one of the

changes which the languages of communities undergo. We know, indeed,

that these changes are due to imperfect imitation by succeeding

generations of learners.[83] Hence we need not be surprised to find now

and again analogies between these nursery transformations and those of

words in the development of languages. In reproducing the sounds which

he hears a child often illustrates a law of adult phonetic change. Thus

changes within the same class of sounds, as the frequent alteration of

‘this’ into ‘dis,’ clearly correspond with those modifications

recognised in Grimm’s Law. So, too, the common substitution of a dental

for a guttural has its parallel in the changes of racial language.[84]

Nobody again can note the transformation of _n_ into _m_ before _f_ in

the form ‘hamfish’ for ‘handkerchief’ without thinking of the Greek

change of συν into συμ before β, and like changes. Philologists may

probably find many other parallels. One of them tells me that his little

girl, on rendering _sh_ by the guttural _h_, reproduced a change in

Spanish pronunciation. M. Egger compares a child’s rendering of ‘_tr_op’

(French) by ‘_cr_op’ with the transformation of the Latin ‘_tr_emere’

into ‘_cr_aindre’.

-----

Footnote 83:

See Sweet, _History of English Sounds_, p. 15.

Footnote 84:

See Sievers, _Phonetik_, p. 230.

-----

I have assumed here that children’s defective reproduction of our verbal

sounds is the result of inability to produce certain sounds and not due

to the want of a discrimination of the sounds by the ear. This may seem

strange in the light of Preyer’s statement that the earlier impulsive

babbling includes most, if not all, of the sounds required later on for

articulation. This may turn out to be an exaggeration, yet there is no

doubt, I think, that certain sounds, including some as the initial _l_

which are common in the earlier babbling stage, are not produced at the

beginning of the articulatory period. As the avoidance of these occurs

in all children alike it seems reasonable to infer that they involve

difficult muscular combinations in the articulatory organ. At the same

time it seems going too far to say, as Schultze does, that the order of

acquisition of sounds corresponds with the degree of difficulty. The

very variability of this order in the case of different children shows

that there is no such simple correspondence as this.[85]

-----

Footnote 85:

_Cf._ Pollock, _Mind_, vi., p. 436, and Preyer, _op. cit._, p. 434.

-----

The explanation of those early omissions and alterations is probably a

rather complex matter. To begin with, the speech-organs of a child may

lose special aptitudes by the development of other and opposed

aptitudes. A friend of mine, a physiologist, tells me that his little

boy who said ‘ma-ma’ (but not ‘da-da’) at ten months lost at the age of

nineteen months the use of _m_, for which he regularly substituted _b_.

He suggests that the nasal sound _m_, though easy for a child in the

sucking stage and accustomed to close the lips, may become difficult

later on through the acquisition of open sounds. It is worth considering

whether this principle does not apply to other inabilities. This,

however, is a question for the science of phonetics.

We must remember, further, that it is one thing to carry out an

articulatory movement as a child of nine months carries it out,

‘impulsively,’ through some congenitally arranged mode of exciting the

proper motor centre, another thing to carry it out volitionally, _i.e._,

in order to produce a desired result. This last means that the

sound-effect of the movement has been learned, that the image or

representation of it has been brought into definite connexion with a

particular impulse, _viz._, that of carrying out the required movement:

and this is now known to depend on the formation of some definite neural

connexion between the auditory and the motor regions of the

speech-centre. This process is clearly more complex than the first

instinctive utterance, and may be furthered or hindered by various

conditions. Thus a child’s own spontaneous babblings may not have

sufficed to impress a particular sound on the memory; in which case his

acquisition of it will be favoured or otherwise by the frequency with

which it is produced by others in his hearing. It is probable that

differences in the range and accuracy of production of sounds by nurse

and mother tell from the first. The differences observable in the order

of acquisition of sounds among children may be in part due to this, and

not merely to differences in the speech-organ. It is probable, too, that

children’s attention may be especially called to certain sounds or

sound-groups, either because of a preferential liking for the sounds

themselves, or because of a special need of them as useful names. M.’s

mother assures me that the child seemed to dislike particular sounds as

_j_, which she could and did occasionally pronounce, though she was

given to altering them.[86] Another lady writes that her boy at the age

of twenty-two months surprised her by suddenly bringing out the

combination ‘scissors’. He had just begun to use scissors in cutting up

paper, and so had acquired a practical interest in this sound-mass.

-----

Footnote 86:

The same child, capriciously as it might look, would sometimes avoid

_y_, as in saying ‘esh’ for ‘yes,’ though she regularly used this

sound as a substitute for _l_, saying ‘yook’ for ‘look,’ and so on.

-----

We may now pass to another of the commonly recognised defects of early

articulation, _viz._, the transposition of sounds or metathesis.

Sometimes it is two contiguous sounds which are transposed, as when

‘star’ is rendered by ‘tsar’ and ‘spoon’ by ‘psoon’. Here the motive of

the change is evidently to facilitate the combination. We have a

parallel to this in the use of ‘aks’ (ax) for ‘ask,’ a transposition

which was not long since common enough in the West of England.[87] In

other transpositions sounds are shifted further from their place. Preyer

quotes a case in which there was a dislocation of vowel sounds, _viz._,

in the transformation of ‘bite’ (German) into ‘beti’.[88] Here there

seems to be no question of avoiding a difficult combination. Other

examples are the following: ‘hoogshur’ for ‘sugar’ (one of the first

noticed at the age of two); ‘mungar’ for ‘grandmamma,’ ‘punga’ for

‘grandpapa,’ and ‘natis’ for ‘nasty’ (boy between eighteen and

twenty-four months); and ‘boofitul’ for ‘beautiful’. Here again we have

an analogy to defective speech in adults. When a man is very tired he is

liable to precisely similar inversions of order. The explanation seems

to be that the right group of sounds may present itself to the speaker’s

consciousness without any clear apprehension of their temporal order.

Perhaps quasi-æsthetic preferences play a part here too. The child M.

seems to have preferred the sequence _m-n_ to _n-m_, saying ‘jaymen’ for

‘geranium’, ‘burman’ for ‘laburnum’.

-----

Footnote 87:

See Sweet, _History of English Sounds_, p. 33; _cf._ also the change

of ‘frith’ to ‘firth’.

Footnote 88:

_Op. cit._, p. 397.

-----

Another interesting feature in this early articulation is the impulse to

double sounds, to get a kind of effect of assonance or of rhyme by a

repetition of sound or sound-group. The first and simplest form of this

is where a whole sound-mass or syllable is iterated, as in the familiar

‘ba-ba,’ ‘gee-gee’ ‘ni-ni’ (for nice). Some children frequently turn

monosyllables into reduplications, making book ‘boom-boom’ and so forth.

It is, however, in attempting dissyllables that the reduplication is

most common. Thus ‘naughty’ becomes ‘na-na,’ ‘faster’ ‘fa-fa,’ ‘Julia’

‘dum-dum,’ and so forth, where the repeated syllable displaces the

second original syllable and so serves to retain something of the

original word-form. In some cases the second and unaccented syllable is

selected for reduplication, as in the instance quoted by Perez,

‘peau-peau’ for ‘chapeau’. Such reduplications are sometimes aided by

kinship of sound, as when the little girl M. changed ‘purple’ into its

primitive form ‘purpur’.

These early reduplications are clearly a continuation of the repetitions

observable in the earlier babbling, and grow out of the same motive, the

impulse to go on doing a thing, and the pleasure of repetition and

self-imitation. As is well known, these reduplications have their

parallel in many of the names used by savage tribes.[89]

-----

Footnote 89:

See Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, i., 198. On the taking up of baby

reduplications into language see the same work, i., 204. _Cf._ the

same writer’s _Anthropology_, p. 129.

-----

In addition to these palpable reduplications of sound-masses we have

repetitions of single sounds, the repeated sound being substituted for

another and foreign one. This answers to what is called in phonetics

‘assimilations’.[90] In the majority of cases the assimilation is

‘progressive,’ the change being carried out by a preceding on a

succeeding sound. Examples are ‘Kikie’ for ‘Kitty,’ and ‘purpur’ for

‘purple’. This last transformation, though it was made by the little

daughter of a distinguished philologist, was quite innocent of classical

influence, and was clearly motived by the childish love of reduplication

of sound. In many cases the substitution of an easy for a difficult

sound seems to be determined in part by assimilation, as when ‘another’

was rendered by ‘annunner,’ ‘gateau’ (French) by ‘ca-co’. The

assimilation seems, too, sometimes to work “regressively,” as when

‘thick’ becomes ‘kick,’ ‘Bonnie Dundee’ ‘Bun-dun,’ and ‘tortue’ (French)

‘tu-tu,’ in which two last reduplication is secured approximately or

completely by change of vowel.[91] There seem also to be cases of what

may be called partial assimilation, that is, a tendency to transform a

sound into one of the same class as the first. “If (writes a mother of

her boy) a word began with a labial he generally concluded it with a

labial, making ‘bird,’ for example, ‘bom’.” But these cases are not,

perhaps, perfectly clear examples of assimilation.

-----

Footnote 90:

See above, p. 137; _cf._ Sievers, _Phonetik_, p. 236.

Footnote 91:

Dr. Postgate suggests that the current terms ‘progressive’ and

‘regressive’ would be better rendered by ‘retrospective’ and

‘prospective’.

-----

Along with the tendency to reduplicate syllabic masses, we see a

disposition to use habitually certain favourite syllables as

terminations, more particularly the pet ending ‘_ie_’. Thus ‘sugar’

becomes ‘sugie,’ ‘picture’ ‘pickie,’ and so forth. One child was so much

in love with this syllable as to prefer it even to the common repetition

of sound in onomatopoetic imitation, naming the hen not ‘tuck-tuck’ as

one might expect, but ‘tuckie’.

What strikes one in these early modifications of our verbal sounds by

the child is the care for metrical qualities and the comparative

disregard for articulatory characteristics. The number of syllabic

sounds, the distribution of stress, as well as the rise and fall of

vocal pitch, are the first things to be attended to, and these are, on

the whole, carefully rendered when the constituent sounds are changed

into other and often very unlike ones, and the order of the sounds is

reversed. Again, the comparative fidelity in rendering the vowel sounds

illustrates the prominence of the metrical or musical quality in

childish speech. The love of reduplication, of the effect of assonance

and rhyme, illustrates the same point. This may be seen in some of the

more playful sayings of the child M., as ‘Babba hiding, Ice (Alice)

spiding (spying)’.

As I have dwelt at some length on the defective articulation of

children, 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 audible trial of difficult combinations, and with a

wonderful degree of accuracy. A child can often articulate better than

he is wont to do. The little girl M., when one year six months, being

asked teasingly to say ‘mudder,’ said with a laugh ‘mother,’ quite

correctly—but only on this one occasion. 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 as it

would seem without any tentative practice, points, I suspect, to a good

deal of silent rehearsal, nascent groupings of muscular actions which

are not carried far enough to produce sound.

The gradual development of the child’s articulatory powers, as indicated

partly by the precision of the sounds formed, partly by their

differentiation and multiplication, is a matter of great interest. At

the beginning, when he 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 represent 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 sound

grows 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 soon after two years it was a sound between

‘mik’ and ‘milk’.” The same child in learning to say ‘lion’ went through

the stages ‘ŭn’ (one year eight months), ‘ion’ (two years), and ‘lion’

(two years and eight months). The little girl M., in learning the word

‘breakfast,’ advanced by the stages ‘bepper,’ ‘beffert,’ ‘beffust’. In

an example given by Preyer, ‘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: (1) ‘vavaff,’ (2) ‘fafaff,’ (3) ‘vaffaff,’

(4) ‘vasse,’ and (5) ‘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, and 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 suggestive parallels in these developmental changes in children’s

articulation.

The rapidity of articulatory progress might be measured by a careful

noting of the increase in the number of vocables mastered from month to

month. Although Preyer and others have given lists of vocables used at

particular ages, and parents have sent me lists, I have met with no

methodical record of the gradual extension of the articulate field. It

is obvious that any observations under this head, save in the very early

stages, can only be very rough. No observer of a talkative child,

however attentive, can make sure of all the word-sounds used. It is to

be noted, too, as we have seen above, that a child will sometimes show

that he can master a sound and will even make a temporary use of it,

without retaining it as a part of the permanent linguistic stock.[92]

-----

Footnote 92:

As samples of the observations the following may be taken. A friend

tells me his boy when one year old used just 50 vocables. The

performances vary greatly. One American girl of twenty-two months had

69, whereas another about the same age had 136, just twice the number.

A German girl eighteen months old is said by Preyer to have used 119

words, and to have raised this to 435 in the next six months. The

composition of these early vocabularies will occupy us presently.

-----

_Logical Side of Children’s Language._

It is now time to pass from the mechanical to the logical side of this

early child-language, to the meanings which the small linguist gives to

his articulate sounds and the ways in which he modifies these meanings.

The growth of a child’s speech means a concurrent progress in the

mastery of word-forms and in the acquisition of ideas. In this each of

the two factors aids the other, the advance of ideas pushing the child

to new uses of sounds, and the growing facility in word-formation

reacting powerfully on the ideas, giving them definiteness of outline

and fixity of structure. I shall not attempt here to give a complete

account of the process, but content myself with touching on one or two

of its more interesting aspects.

A child acquires the proper use or application of a word by associating

the sound heard with the object, situation or action in connexion with

which others are observed to use it. But the first imitation of words

does not show that the little mind has seized their full and precise

meaning. A clear and exact apprehension of meaning comes but slowly, and

only as the result of many hard thought-processes, comparisons and

discriminations.

In these first attempts to use our speech, the child’s mind is innocent

of grammatical distinctions. These arise out of the particular uses of

words in sentence-structure, and of this structure the child has as yet

no inkling. If, then, following a common practice, I speak of a child of

twelve or fifteen months as _naming_ an object, the reader must not

suppose that I am ascribing to the baby-mind a clear grasp of the

function of what grammarians call nouns (substantives). All that is

implied in this way of speaking, is that the infant’s first words are

used mainly as recognition-signs. There is from the first, I conceive,

even in the gesture of pointing and saying ‘da!’ a germ of this naming

process.

The progress of this rude naming or articulate recognition is very

interesting. The names first learnt are either those of individuals,

what we call proper names, as ‘mamma,’ ‘nurse,’ or those which, like

‘bath,’ ‘bow-wow,’ are at first applied to one particular object. It is

often supposed that a child uses these as true singular names,

recognising individual objects as such. But this is pretty certainly an

error. He cannot note differences well enough or grasp a sufficient

number of differential marks to know an individual as such, and he will,

as occasion arises, quite spontaneously extend his names to other things

which happen to have some interesting and notable points in common with

the first. Thus ‘bow-wow,’ though first applied to one particular dog,

is, as we know, at once extended to other dogs, pictures of dogs, and

not infrequently other things as well. If then we speak of the child as

generalising or widening the application of his terms, we must not be

taken to mean that he goes through a process of comparing things which

he perceives to be distinct, and discovering a likeness in these, but

that he merely assimilates or recognises something like that which he

has seen before without troubling to note the differences.

This extension of names or generalising process proceeds primarily and

mainly by the feeling for the likenesses or the common aspects of

things, though as we shall see presently their connexions of time and

place afford a second and subordinate means of extension. The

transference of a name from object to object through this apprehension

of a likeness or assimilation has already been touched upon. It moves

along thoroughly childish lines, and constitutes one of the most

striking and interesting of the manifestations of precocious

originality. Yet if unconventional in its mode of operation it is

essentially thought-activity, a connecting of like with like, and a

rudimentary grouping of things in classes.

This tendency to comprehend like things or situations under a single

articulate sign is seen already in the use of the early indicative sign

‘atta’ (all gone). It was used by Preyer’s child to mark not only the

departure of a thing but the putting out of a flame, later on, an empty

glass or other vessel. By another child it was extended to the ending of

music, the closing of a drawer and so on. Here, however, the various

applications probably answer more to a common feeling of ending or

missing than to an apprehension of a common objective situation.

Coming to words which we call names we find that the child will often

extend a recognition-sign from one object to a second, and to our

thinking widely dissimilar object through the discovery of some analogy.

Such extension, moving rather along poetic lines than those of our

logical classifications, is apt, as we have seen, to wear a quaint

metaphorical aspect. A star, for example, looked at, I suppose, as a

small bright spot, was called by one child an eye. The child M. called

the opal globe of a lighted lamp a ‘moon’. ‘Pin’ was extended by another

child to a crumb just picked up, a fly, and a caterpillar, and seemed to

mean something little to be taken between the fingers. The same child

used the sound ‘’at’ (hat) for anything put on the head, including a

hair-brush. Another child used the word ‘key’ for other bright metal

things, as money. Romanes’ child extended the word ‘star,’ the first

vocable learned after ‘Mamma’ and ‘Papa,’ to bright objects generally,

candles, gas-flames, etc. Taine speaks of a child of one year who after

first applying the word “fafer” (from “chemin de fer”) to railway

engines went on to transfer it to a steaming coffee-pot and everything

that hissed or smoked or made a noise. In these last illustrations we

have plainly a rudimentary process of classification. Any point of

likeness, provided it is of sufficient interest to strike the attention,

may thus serve as a basis of childish classification.

As with names of things so with those of actions. The crackling noise of

the fire was called by one child ‘barking,’ and the barking of a dog was

named by another ‘coughing’. We see from this that the particular line

of analogical extension followed by a child will depend on the nature of

the first impressions or experiences which serve as his starting point.

A like originality is apt to show itself in the first crude attempt to

seize and name the relations of things. The child C. called dipping

bread in gravy ‘ba’ (bath). Another child extended the word ‘door’ to

“everything that stopped up an opening or prevented an exit, including

the cork of a bottle, and the little table that fastened him in his high

chair”.

In these extensions we see the tendency of child-thought towards

‘concretism,’ or the use of a simple concrete idea in order to express a

more abstract idea. Children frequently express the contrast big,

little, by the pretty figurative language ‘Mamma’ and ‘baby’. Thus a

small coin was called by an American child a ‘baby dollar’. Romanes’

daughter, named Ilda, pointed out the sheep in a picture as ‘Mamma-ba’

and the lambs as ‘Ilda-ba’. It is somewhat the same process when the

child extends an idea obtained from the most impressive experience of

childish difficulty, _viz._, ‘too big,’ so as to make it do duty for the

abstract notion ‘too difficult’ in general.

In this extension of language by the child we may discern, along with

this play of the feeling for similarity, the working of association.

This is illustrated by the case of Darwin’s grandchild, who when just

beginning to speak used the common sign ‘quack’ for duck, then extended

this to water, then, following up this associative transference by a

double process of generalisation, made the sound serve as the name of

all birds and insects on the one hand, and all fluid substances on the

other.[93]

-----

Footnote 93:

Quoted by Romanes, _Mental Evolution in Man_, p. 283.

-----

The transference of the name ‘quack’ from the animal to the water is a

striking example of the tendency of the young mind to view things which

are presented together as belonging one to another and in a manner

identical. Another curious instance is given by Professor Minto, in

which a child, who applied the word ‘mambro’ to her nurse, went on to

extend it by associative transference to the nurse’s sewing machine,

then by analogy applied it to a hand-organ in the street, later on,

through an association of hand-organ with monkey, to his india-rubber

monkey. Here we have a whole history of change of word-meaning

illustrating in curiously equal measure the play of assimilation and of

association, and falling within a period of two years.[94]

-----

Footnote 94:

_Logic_ (University Extension Manuals), pp. 83-84.

-----

There is another way in which children are said to ‘extend’ names

somewhat analogous to the processes of assimilation and associate

transference. They are very fond of using the same word for opposed or

other correlative ideas. In some cases we can see that this is due

merely to confusion or want of discrimination. When, for example,

Preyer’s boy confused ‘too little’ with ‘too much,’ and ‘yesterday’ with

‘to-morrow,’ going so far as to make a compound ‘heitgestern’ (_i.e._,

heutegestern) to include both,[95] it is easy to see that the child’s

mind had reached merely the vague idea unsuitable in quantity in the one

case, and time not present in the other; and that he failed to

differentiate these ideas. In other cases where correlatives are

confused, as when a child extended the sign of asking for an eatable

(‘bit-ye’) to the act of offering anything to another, or when as in

C.’s case ‘spend’ was made to do duty for ‘cost,’ ‘borrow’ for ‘lend,’

and ‘learn’ for ‘teach,’ the explanation is slightly different. A child

can only acquire an idea of abstract relations slowly and by stages.

Such words as _lend_, _teach_, call up first a pictorial idea of an

action in which two persons are seen to be concerned. But the exact

nature of the relation, and the difference in its aspect as we start

from the one or the other term, are not perceived. Thus in thinking of a

purchase over the counter, a child may be supposed to image the action

but not clearly to distinguish the part taken by the person who buys and

gives out money (‘spends’) and the part taken by the person who demands

a price or fixes the cost. Perhaps we get near this vague awareness of a

relation when we are aiding a violinist to tune his instrument. We may

know that his note and our piano note do not accord, and yet be quite

unable to determine their exact relation, and to fix the one as higher,

the other as lower.

-----

Footnote 95:

See _op. cit._, p. 420, also pp. 414 and 418.

-----

An interesting variety of this extension of names to correlatives is the

transference of the attributes of causal agent to passive object, and

_vice versâ_. Thus a little girl of four called her parasol when blown

by the wind ‘a windy parasol,’ and a stone that made her hand sore ‘a

very sore stone’. A little Italian girl that had taken some nasty

medicines expressed the fact by calling herself nasty (‘bimba

cattiva’).[96]

-----

Footnote 96:

Paola Lombroso, _Saggi di Psicologia del Bambino_, p. 16.

-----

There is much in the whole of these changes introduced by the child into

the uses or meanings of words which may remind one of the changes which

go on in the growth of languages in communities. Thus the child’s

metaphorical use of words, his setting forth of an abstract idea by some

analogous concrete image, has its counterpart, as we know, in the early

stages of human language. Tribes which have no abstract signs employ a

metaphor exactly as the child does. Our own language preserves the

traces of this early figurative use of words; as in ‘imbecile,’ weak,

which originally meant leaning on a staff, and so forth.[97]

-----

Footnote 97:

See Trench’s account of poetry in words, _On the Study of Words_,

lect. vi.

-----

Again, we may trace in the development of languages the counterpart of

those processes by which children spontaneously expand what logicians

call the denotation of their names. The word ‘sun’ has only quite

recently undergone this kind of extension by being applied to other

centres of systems besides our familiar sun. The multiplicity of

meanings of certain words, as ‘post,’ ‘stock’ and so forth, points to

the double process of assimilative and associative extension which we

saw illustrated in the use of the child’s word ‘mambro’.

Once more, the child’s extension of a word from an idea to its

correlative has its parallel in the adult’s use of language. As the

vulgar expression ‘I’ll larn you’ shows (_cf._ the Anglo-Saxon

_leornian_), a word may come to mean both to teach and to become taught.

A like embracing of agent and object acted upon by the same word is seen

in the ‘active’ and ‘passive’ meanings of words like the Latin

_penetrabilis_ (‘piercing’ and ‘pierceable’), and in the ‘objective’ and

‘subjective’ meanings of ‘pleasant’ and similar words. We are beginning,

like the little girl quoted above, to speak of a ‘sore’ topic. Lastly,

the movement of thought underlying the saying of the little Italian

girl, ‘nasty baby,’ seems to be akin to that of the savage when he

supposes that he appropriates the qualities of that which he eats.

The changes here touched upon have to do with what philologists call

generalisation. As supplementary to these there is in the case of the

growth of a community-language a process of specialisation, as when

‘physician’ from meaning a student of nature has come to mean one who

has acquired and can practically apply one branch of nature-knowledge.

In the case of the child we have an analogue of this in the gradual

limitation of names to narrower classes or to individuals as the result

of carrying out certain processes of comparison and discrimination. Thus

‘ba-ba,’ which is used at first for a miscellaneous crowd of woolly or

hairy quadrupeds, gets specialised as a name for a sheep, and the

much-abused ‘papa’ becomes restricted to its rightful owner.

This process of differentiation and specialisation assumes an

interesting form in a characteristic feature of the language-invention

of both children and savages, _viz._, the formation of compound words.

These compounds are often true metaphors. Thus in the case already

quoted where an eye-lid was called an eye-curtain the child may be said

to have resorted to a metaphorical way of describing the lid. It is much

the same when M. at the age of one year nine months invented the

expression ‘bwite (bright) penny’ for silver pieces. A slightly

different example is the compound ‘foot-wing’ invented by the child C.

to describe the limb of a seal. As a further variety of this metaphoric

formation I may quote the pretty name ‘tell-wind’ which a boy of four

years and eight months hit upon as a name for the weather-vane.

In these and similar cases, there is at once an analogical transference

of meaning (_e.g._, from curtain to lid) or process of generalisation,

and a limitation of meaning by the appended or qualifying word ‘eye’ and

so a process of specialisation.

In certain cases the analogical extension gives place to what we should

call a classification. One child for example, knowing the word

steam-ship and wanting the name sailing-ship, invented the form

‘wind-ship’. The little girl M., when one year and nine months old,

showed quite a passion for classing by help of compounds, arranging the

rooms into ‘morner-room,’ ‘dinner-room’ (she was fond of adding ‘er’ at

this time) and ‘nursery-room’.

It might be supposed from a logical point of view that in these

inventions the qualifying or determining word would come more naturally

after the generic name, as in the French _moulin à vent, cygne noir_. I

have heard of one English child who used the form ‘mill-wind’ in

preference to ‘wind-mill,’ and the order ‘dog black’ in preference to

‘black dog’. It would be worth while to note any similar instances.

In these inventions, again, we may detect a close resemblance between

children’s language and that of savages. In presence of a new object a

savage behaves very much as a child, he shapes a new name out of

familiar ones, a name that commonly has much of the metaphorical

character. Thus the Aztecs called a boat a ‘water-house’; and the

Vancouver islanders when they saw a screw-steamer called it the

‘kick-kicket’.[98]

-----

Footnote 98:

Tylor, _Anthropology_, chap. v.

-----

A somewhat different class of word-inventions is that in which a child

frames a new word on the analogy of known words. A common case is the

invention of new substantives from verbs after the pattern of other

substantives. The results are often quaint enough. Sometimes it is the

agent who is named by the new word, as when the boy C. talked of the

‘Rainer,’ the fairy who makes rain, or when another little boy dubbed a

teacher the ‘lessoner’. Sometimes it is the product of the action that

is named, as when the same child C. and the deaf-mute Laura Bridgman

both invented the form ‘thinks’ for ‘thoughts’. In much the same way a

boy of three called the holes which he dug in his garden his ‘digs’. The

reverse process, the formation of a verb from a substantive, also

occurs. Thus one child invented the form ‘dag’ for striking with a

dagger; and Preyer’s boy when two years and two months old formed the

verb ‘messen’ to express cut from the substantive ‘messer’ (a knife). It

was probably a similar process when the child M. at one year ten months,

after seeing a motionless worm and being told that it was dead, asked to

see another worm ‘deading’. The same child coined the neat verb-form

‘unparcel’. This readiness to form verbs from substantives and _vice

versâ_, which is abundantly illustrated in the development of language,

is without doubt connected with the primitive and natural mode of

thinking. The object is of greatest interest both to the child and to

primitive man as an agent, or as the last stage or result of an action.

In certain of these original formations we may detect a fine feeling for

verbal analogy. Thus a French boy, after killing the ‘limaces’ (snails)

which were eating the plants in the garden, dignified his office by

styling himself a ‘limarcier’; where the inventive faculty was no doubt

led by the analogy of ‘voiturier’ formed from ‘voiture’.[99]

-----

Footnote 99:

Compayré, _op. cit._, p. 249, where other examples are given.

-----

In other verbal formations it is difficult to determine the model which

is followed. Signorina Lombroso gives a good example. A little girl of

two and a half years had observed that when her mother allowed her to

take, eat, or drink something, she would say ‘prendilo’ (take it),

‘bevilo’ (drink it), or ‘mangialo’ (eat it). She proceeded to make a

kind of adjective or substantive out of each of these, asking ‘é

prendilo?’ ‘é bevilo?’ ‘é mangialo?’ _i.e._, ‘Is it takable or a case of

taking?’ etc., when she wanted to take, drink, or eat something.[100] By

such skilful artifices does the little word-builder find his way to the

names which he has need of.

-----

Footnote 100:

_Op. cit._, p. 12.

-----

In certain cases these original constructions are of a more clumsy order

and due to a partial forgetfulness of a word and an effort to complete

it. Thus a boy of four spoke of being ‘sorrified,’ where he was

evidently led out of the right track by the analogy of ‘horrified’. The

same little boy who talked of his ‘digs’ used the word ‘magnicious’ for

‘magnificent’. This is a choice example of word-transformation. No doubt

the child was led by the feeling for the sound of this termination in

other grand words, as ‘ambitious’. Possible, too, he might have heard

the form ‘magnesia’ and been influenced by a reminiscence of this

sound-complex. The talk of ‘Jeames’ with which Mr. Punch makes us

acquainted is full of just such delightful missings of the mark in

trying to reproduce big words.

_Sentence-building._

We may now follow the child in his later and more ambitious linguistic

efforts. The transition to this higher plane is marked by the use of the

completed form of thought, the sentence.

At first, as already pointed out, there is no sentence-structure. The

child begins to talk by using single words. These words consist of what

we call substantives, as ‘Mamma,’ ‘nurse,’ ‘milk,’ a few adjectives, as

‘hot,’ ‘nice,’ ‘good,’ a still smaller number of adverbial signs, as

‘ta-ta,’ or ‘away,’ ‘over,’ ‘down,’ ‘up,’ and one or two verb-forms,

apparently imperatives, as ‘go’. The exact order in which these appear,

and the proportion between the different classes of constituents at a

particular age, say two and a half or three, appear to vary greatly.

Words descriptive of actions, though very few at first, appear to grow

numerous in a later stage.[101]

-----

Footnote 101:

For lists of vocabularies and an analysis of their composition see

Preyer, _op. cit._ (4th ed.), p. 372 ff.; Tracy, _Psychology of

Childhood_, p. 76 ff.

-----

In speaking of these words as substantives, adjectives, and so forth, I

am merely adopting a convenient mode of description. We must not suppose

that the words as used in this simple disjointed talk have their full

grammatical value. It is not generally recognised that the single-worded

utterance of the child is an abbreviated sentence or ‘sentence-word’

analogous to the sentence-words found in the simplest known stage of

adult language. As with the race so with the child, the sentence

precedes the word. Moreover, each of the child’s so-called words in his

single-worded talk stands for a considerable variety of sentence-forms.

Thus the words in the child’s vocabulary which we call substantives do

duty for verbs and so forth. As Preyer remarks, ‘chair’ (stuhl) means

‘There is no chair,’ ‘I want to be put in the chair,’ ‘The chair is

broken,’ and so forth. In like manner ‘dow’ (down) may mean ‘The spoon

has fallen down,’ ‘I am down,’ ‘I want to go down,’ etc.[102] The

particular shade of meaning intended is indicated by intonation and

gesture.

-----

Footnote 102:

See Preyer, _op. cit._, p. 361; Romanes, _op. cit._, p. 296 ff.

-----

This sentence-construction begins with a certain timidity. The age at

which it is first observed varies greatly. It seems in most cases to be

somewhere about the twenty-first month, yet I find good observers among

my correspondents giving as dates eighteen and a half and nineteen

months; and a friend of mine, a Professor of Literature, tells me that

his boy formed simple sentences as early as fifteen months. We commonly

have at first quite short sentences formed by two words in apposition.

These may consist of what we should call an adjective added to and

qualifying a substantive, as in the simple utterance of the child C.,

‘Big bir’ (bird), or the exclamation, ‘Papa no’ (Papa’s nose); or they

may arise by a combination of substantives, as in the sentence given by

Tracy, ‘Papa cacker,’ _i.e._, ‘Papa has crackers,’ and one quoted by

Preyer, ‘Auntie cake’ (German, ‘Danna Kuha,’ _i.e._, ‘Tante Kuche’) for

‘Auntie has given me cake’; and in a somewhat different example of a

compound sentence also given by Preyer, ‘Home milk’ (German, ‘Haim

Mimi’), interpreted as ‘I want to go home and have milk’. In the case of

one child about the age of twenty-three months most of the sentences

were composed of two words, one of which was a verb in the imperative.

The love of commanding, so strong in the child, makes the use of the

imperative, as is seen in this case, very common. M.’s first performance

in sentence-building (at eighteen and a half months) was, ‘Mamma, tie,’

_i.e._, ‘tie gloves’.

Little by little the learner manages longer sentences, economising his

resources to the utmost, troubling nothing about inflections or the

insertion of prepositions so as to indicate precise relations, but

leaving his hearer to discover his meaning as best he may; and it is

truly wonderful how much the child manages to express in this rude

fashion. A boy nineteen and a half months old gave this elaborate order

to his father: ‘Dada toe toe ba,’ that is, ‘Dada is to go and put his

toes in the bath’. Pollock’s little girl in the first essay at

sentence-building, recorded at the age of twenty-one and a half months,

actually managed a neat antithesis: ‘Cabs dati, clam clin,’ that is to

say, ‘Cabs are dirty, and the perambulator is clean’. Preyer’s boy in

the beginning of the third year brought out the following, ‘Mimi atta

teppa papa oi,’ that is to say, ‘Milch atta Teppich Papa fui,’ which

appears to have signified, “The milk is gone, it is on the carpet, and

papa said ‘Fie’”. It may be added that the difficulties of deciphering

these early sentences is aggravated by the frequent resort to slurs, as

when a child says, ‘m’ out’ for ‘take me out,’ ‘’t on’ for ‘put it on’.

The order of words in these first tentative sentences is noticeable.

Sometimes the subject is placed after the predicate, as in an example

given by Pollock, ‘Run away man,’ _i.e._, ‘The man runs (or has run)

away,’ and in the still quainter example given by the same writer,

‘Out-pull-baby ’pecs (spectacles),’ _i.e._, ‘Baby pulls or will pull out

the spectacles’. In like manner the adjective used as predicate may

precede the subject, as in the examples given by Maillet, ‘Jolie la

fleur,’ etc.[103] Sometimes, again, the object comes before the verb, as

apparently in the following example given by Miss Shinn: a little girl

delighted at the prospect of going out to see the moon exclaimed,

“Moo-ky (sky), baby shee (see)”.[104] Here is a delightful example of a

transposition of subject and object. A boy two years and three months

asked, ‘Did Ack (Alec) chocke an apple?’ _i.e._, ‘Did an apple choke

Alec?’ though in this case we very probably have to do with a

misunderstanding of the action choke. Other kinds of inversion occur

when more complex experiments are attempted, as in connecting ‘my’ with

an adjective. Thus one child said prettily, ‘Poor my friends’;[105]

which archaic form may be compared with the following Gallic-looking

idiom used by M. at the age of one year ten months: ‘How Babba (baby,

_i.e._, herself) does feed nicely!’ The same little girl put the

auxiliary out of its place, saying, ‘Tan (can) Babba wite’ for ‘Baby can

write,’ though this was probably a reminiscence of the question-form.

-----

Footnote 103:

See Compayré, _op. cit._, p. 206.

Footnote 104:

_Notes on the Development of a Child_, p. 84.

Footnote 105:

Canton, _The Invisible Playmate_, p. 32, who adds that this exactly

answers to the form, “Good my lord!”

-----

These inversions of our familiar order are suggestive. They have some

resemblance to the curious order which appears in the spontaneous

sign-making of deaf-mutes. Thus a deaf-mute answered the question, ‘Who

made God?’ by saying, “God made nothing,” _i.e._, “nothing made God”.

Similarly the deaf-mute Laura Bridgman expressed the petition, ‘Give

Laura bread,’ by the form, ‘Laura bread give.’[106] Such inversions, as

we know, are allowable and common in certain languages, _e.g._, Latin.

The study of the syntax of child-language and of the sign-making of

deaf-mutes might suggest that our English order is not in certain cases

the most natural one.

-----

Footnote 106:

See Romanes, _op. cit._, p. 116 f., where other examples may be found.

-----

A somewhat similar inversion of what seems to us the proper order

appears in the child’s first attempts at negation. The child C. early in

his third year expressed the idea that he was not going into the sea

thus: ‘N. (his own name) go in water, no’. Similarly Pollock’s child

expressed acquiescence in a prohibition in this manner, ‘Baby have papa

(pepper) no,’ where the ‘no’ followed without a pause. The same order

appears in the case of French children, _e.g._, ‘Papa non,’ _i.e._, ‘It

is not Papa,’ and seems to be a common, if not a universal form of the

first half-spontaneous sentence-building. Here again we see an analogy

to the syntax of deaf-mutes, who appear to append the sign of negation

in a similar way, _e.g._, ‘Teacher I beat, deceive, scold no,’ _i.e._,

‘I must not beat, deceive, scold my teacher’. We see something like it,

too, in the formations of savage-languages, as when ‘fool no’ comes to

be the sign of ‘not fool,’ that is of wise.[107] When ‘not’ comes into

use it is apt to be put in a wrong place, as when the little girl M.

said, ‘No Babba look’ (_i.e._, ‘Babba will not look’), and ‘Mr. Dill not

did tum’ for ‘Mr. Gill did not come’.[108]

-----

Footnote 107:

_Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology_, 1879-80, p. 391 ff.

Footnote 108:

It may be added that this child regularly used ‘not’ or ‘n’t’ as a

negating or cancelling sign for the whole sentence, saying, for

example, ‘Babba mus’n’t go in,’ for ‘Babba may stay out’.

-----

Another closely related characteristic of this early childish

sentence-building is the love of antithesis under the form of two

balancing statements. Thus a child will often oppose an affirmative to a

negative statement as a means of bringing out the full meaning of the

former. The boy C., for example, would say, ‘This a nice bow-wow, not

nasty bow-wow’. The little girl M. said, ‘Boo (the name of her cat) dot

(got) tail; poor Babba dot no tail,’ proceeding to search for a tail

under her skirts. This use of a negative statement by way of contrast or

opposition to an affirmative grew in the case of one child aged two

years and two months into a habit of description by negations. Thus an

orange was described by the saying, ‘No, ’tisn’t apple,’ porridge by

‘No, ’tisn’t bread and milk’. It is interesting to note that deaf-mutes

proceed in a similar fashion by way of antithetic negative statement.

Thus one of these expressed the thought, ‘I must love and honour my

teacher,’ by the order, ‘Teacher I beat, deceive, scold no!—I love

honour yes!’[109]

-----

Footnote 109:

A curious example of negative antithesis is given by Perez, _op.

cit._, p. 196. On other analogies between the syntax of children and

of deaf-mutes, see Compayré, _op. cit._, p. 251 f.

-----

These first essays in the construction of sentences illustrate the skill

of the child in eking out his scanty vocabulary by help of a

metaphorical transference of meaning. Taine gives a charming example of

this device. A little girl of eighteen months had acquired the word

‘Coucou’ as used by her mother or nurse when playfully hiding behind a

door or chair, and the expression ‘ça brûle’ as employed to warn her

that her dinner was too hot, or that she must put on her hat in the

garden to keep off the hot sun. One day on seeing the sun disappear

behind a hill she exclaimed, ‘A bûle coucou’.[110]

-----

Footnote 110:

_On Intelligence_, pt. i., bk. i., chap. ii., sect. vi.

-----

It is a fearful moment when the child first tries his hand at

inflections, and, more especially in our language, those of verbs.

Pollock’s child made the attempt, and successfully, at the age of

twenty-two months. Such first essays are probably examples of pure

imitation, the precise forms used having been previously heard from

others. Hence while they show a growing power of thought, of a

differencing of the relations of number and time, they do not involve

verbal construction properly so called. This last appears as soon as the

child carries over his knowledge of particular cases of verbal

inflection and applies it to new words. This involves a nascent

appreciation of the reason or rule according to which words are

modified. The development of this feeling for the general mode of verbal

change underlies all the later advance in correct speaking.

While the little explorer in the _terra incognita_ of language can

proceed safely in this direction up to a certain point he is apt, as we

all know, to stumble now and again; nor is this to be wondered at when

we remember the intricacies, the irregularities, which characterise a

language like ours. In trying, for example, to manage the preterite of

an English verb he is certain, as, indeed, is the foreigner, to go

wrong. The direction of the error is often in the transformation of the

weak to the strong form; as when ‘screamed’ becomes ‘scram,’ ‘split’

(preterite) ‘splat’ or ‘splut,’ and so forth. In other cases the child

wall convert a strong into a weak form, as when Laura Bridgman, like

many another child, would say, ‘I eated,’ ‘I seed,’ and so forth.[111]

Sometimes, again, delightful doublings of the past tense occur, as

‘sawed’ for ‘saw,’ ‘eatened’ for ‘eaten,’ ‘didn’t saw’ for ‘didn’t see,’

‘did you gave me?’ for ‘did you give me?’ Active and passive forms are

sometimes confused, as when M. said ‘not yike being picking up’ for ‘not

like being picked up,’ etc. It is curious to note the different lines of

imitative construction followed out in these cases.

-----

Footnote 111:

The same double tendency from weak to strong forms and _vice versâ_ is

seen in the list of transformed past participles given by Preyer, _op.

cit._, p. 360.

-----

One thing seems clear here: the child’s instinct is to simplify our

forms, to get rid of irregularities. This is strikingly illustrated in

the use of the heterogeneous assemblage of forms known as the verb ‘to

be’. It is really hard on a child to expect him to answer the question,

‘Are you good now?’ by saying, ‘Yes, I am’. He says, of course, ‘Yes, I

are’. Perhaps the poor verb ‘to be’ has suffered every kind of violence

at the hands of children.[112] Thus the child M. used the form ‘bēd’ for

‘was’. Professor Max Müller somewhere says that children are the

purifiers of language. Would it not be well if they could become its

simplifiers also, and give us in place of this congeries of unrelated

sounds one good decent verb-form?

-----

Footnote 112:

_Cf._ Preyer’s account of a German child’s liberties with the same

verb, where we find ‘gebisst,’ ‘binnst,’ and other odd forms, _op.

cit._, p. 438.

-----

Other quaint transformations occur when the child begins to combine

words, as when M. joining adverb to verb invented the form of past tense

‘fall downed’ for ‘fell down’. Another queer form is ‘Am’t I?’ used for

‘am I not?’ after the pattern of ‘aren’t we?’ An even finer linguistic

stroke than this, is ‘Bettern’t you?’ for ‘Had you not better?’ where

the child was evidently trying to get in the form ‘hadn’t you,’ along

with the awkward ‘better,’ which seemed to belong to the ‘had,’ and

solved the problem by treating ‘better’ as the verb, and dropping ‘had’

altogether.

A study of these solecisms, which are nearly always amusing, and

sometimes daintily pretty, is useful to mothers and young teachers by

way of showing how much hard work, how much of real conjectural

inference, enters into children’s essays in talking. We ought not to

wonder that they now and again slip; rather ought we to wonder that,

with all the intricacies and pitfalls of our language—this applies of

course with especial force to the motley irregular English tongue—they

slip so rarely. As a matter of fact, the latter and more ‘correct’

talk—which is correct just because the child has stored up a good stock

of particular word-forms, and consequently has a much wider range of

pure uninventive imitation—is less admirable than the early inventive

imitation; for this last not only has the quality of originality, but

shows the germ of a truly grammatical feeling for the general types or

norms of the language.

The English child is not much troubled by inflections of substantives.

The pronouns, however, as intelligent mothers know, are apt to cause

much heart-burning to the little linguist. The mastery of ‘I’ and ‘you,’

‘me,’ ‘mine,’ etc., forms an epoch in the development of the linguistic

faculty and of the power of thought which is so closely correlated with

this. Hence it will repay a brief inspection.

As is well known, children begin by speaking of themselves and of those

whom they address by names, as when they say, ‘Baby good,’ ‘Mamma come’.

This is sometimes described as speaking “in the third person,” yet this

is not quite accurate, seeing that there is as yet no distinction of

person at all in the child’s language.

The first use of ‘I’ and ‘you’ between two and three years is apt to be

erroneous. The child proceeds imitatively to use ‘I,’ ‘me,’ ‘my’ for

‘you’ and ‘your’. Thus one child said, ‘What I’m going to do,’ for,

‘What are you going to do?’ In this case, it is plain, there is no clear

grasp of what we mean by subject, or of the exact relation of this

subject to the person he is addressing.

Yet along with this mechanical repetition of the pronominal forms we see

the beginnings of an intelligent use of them. So far as I can ascertain

most children begin to say ‘me’ or ‘my’ before they say ‘you’. Yet I

have met with one or two apparent exceptions to this rule. Thus the boy

C. certainly seemed to get hold of the form of the second person before

that of the first, and the priority of ‘you’ is attested in another case

sent to me. It is desirable to get more observations on this point.

To determine the exact date at which an intelligent use of the first

person appears, is much less easy than it looks. The ‘I’ is apt to

appear momentarily and then disappear, as when M. at the age of nineteen

months three weeks was observed to say ‘I did’ once, though she did not

use ‘I’ again until some time afterwards. Allowing for these

difficulties it may be said with some degree of confidence that the

great transition from ‘baby’ to ‘I’ is wont to take place in favourable

cases early in the first half of the third year. Thus among the dates

assigned by different observers I find, twenty-four months, twenty-five

months (cases given by Preyer), between twenty-five and twenty-six

(Pollock), twenty-seven months (the boy C.). A lady friend tells me that

her boy began to use ‘I’ at twenty-four months. In the case of a certain

number of precocious children this point is attained at an earlier date.

Thus Preyer quotes a case of a child speaking in the first person at

twenty months. Schultze gives a case at nineteen months. A friend of

mine, a Professor of English Literature, whose boy showed great

precocity in sentence-building, reports that he used the forms ‘me’ and

‘I’ within the sixteenth month. Preyer’s boy, on the other hand, who was

evidently somewhat slow in lingual development, first used the form of

the first person ‘to me’ (mir) at the age of twenty-nine months.

The precise way in which these pronominal forms first appear is very

curious. Many children use ‘me’ before ‘I’. Preyer’s boy appears to have

first used the form ‘to me’ (mir). ‘My’ too is apt to appear among the

earliest forms. In such different ways does the child pass to the new

and difficult region of pronominal speech.

The meaning of this transition has given rise to much discussion. It is

plain, to begin with, that a child cannot acquire these forms as he

acquires the name ‘papa,’ ‘nurse,’ by a direct and comparatively

mechanical mode of imitation. When he does imitate in this fashion he

produces, as we have seen, the absurdity of speaking of himself as

‘you’. Hence during the first year or so of speech he makes no use of

these forms. He speaks of himself as ‘baby’ or some equivalent name,

others coming down to his level and setting him the example.

The transition seems to be due in part, as I have elsewhere pointed out,

to a growing self-consciousness, to a clearer singling out of the _ego_

or self as the centre of thought and activity, and the understanding of

the other ‘persons’ in relation to this centre. Not that

self-consciousness _begins_ with the use of ‘I’. The child has no doubt

a rudimentary self-consciousness when he talks about himself as about

another object: yet the use of the forms ‘I,’ ‘me,’ may be taken to mark

the greater precision of the idea of ‘self’ as not merely a bodily

object and nameable just like other sensible things, but as something

distinct from and opposed to all objects of sense, as what we call the

‘subject’ or _ego_.

While, however, we may set down this exchange of the proper name for the

forms ‘I’ and ‘me’ as due to the spontaneous growth of the child’s

intelligence, it is possible that education exerts its influence too. It

is conjecturable that as a child’s intelligence grows, others in

speaking to him tend unknowingly to introduce the forms ‘I’ and ‘you’

more frequently. Yet I am disposed to think that the child commonly

takes the lead here. However this be, it is clear that growing

intelligence, involving greater interest in others’ words, will lead to

a closer attention to these pronominal forms as employed by others. In

this way the environment works on the growing mind of the child,

stimulating it to direct its thoughts to these subtle relations of the

‘me and not me,’ ‘mine and thine’. The more intelligent the environment

the greater will be the stimulating influence: hence, in part at least,

the difference of age when the new style of speech is attained.[113]

-----

Footnote 113:

Preyer (_op. cit._, Cap. 22) seems to argue that children have a clear

self-consciousness before they attempt to use the forms ‘I,’ etc.; and

that the acquisition of the latter is due to imitation. But he does

not show why this imitation should begin to work so powerfully at a

particular period of linguistic development.

-----

The acquirement of these pronominal forms is a slow and irksome

business. At first they are introduced hesitatingly, and alongside of

the proper name; the child, for example, saying sometimes, ‘Baby’ or

‘Ilda,’ sometimes ‘I’ or ‘me’. In some cases, again, the two forms are

used at the same time in apposition, as in the delightful form not

unknown in older folk’s language, ‘Hilda, my book’. The forms ‘I’ and

‘me’ are, moreover, confined at first to a few expressions, as ‘I am,’

‘I went,’ and so forth. The dropping of the old forms, as may be seen by

a glance at the notes on the child C., and at Preyer’s methodical diary,

is a gradual process.

Quaint solecisms mark the first stages of the use of these pronouns. As

in the case of the earlier use of substantives, one and the same form

will be used economically for a variety of meanings, as when ‘me’ was by

the boy C. used to do duty for ‘mine’ also, and ‘us’ for ‘ours’. Here it

is probable there is a lack of perfect discrimination. The connexion

between the self and its belongings is for all of us of the closest.

When a child of two, who was about to be deprived of her doll, shouted,

‘Me, me!’ may we not suppose that the doll was taken up into the inner

circle of the self?[114] Sometimes in this enrichment of the vocabulary

by pronouns new and delightful forms are struck off, as when the little

experimenter invents the possessive form ‘she’s’.

-----

Footnote 114:

Compare above, p. 43.

-----

The perfect unfettered use of these puzzling forms comes much later.

Preyer quotes a case in which a child Olga, aged four years, would say,

‘She has made me wet,’ meaning that she herself had done it. But this

perhaps points to that tendency to split up the self into a number of

personalities, to which reference was made in an earlier essay.

The third year, which witnesses the important addition of the pronouns,

sees other refinements introduced. Thus the definite article was

introduced in the case of Preyer’s boy in the twenty-eighth month, in

that of an English boy at the age of two years eight months.

Prepositions are introduced about the same time. In this way childish

talk begins to lose its primitive disjointed character, and to grow into

an articulated structure.[115] Yet the perfect mastery of these takes

time. A feeling for analogy easily leads the little explorer astray at

first, as when the child M. said ‘far to’ after the model ‘near to’.

-----

Footnote 115:

For a fuller account of this progress, the reader cannot do better

than consult Preyer, _op. cit._, Cap. 20 and 21.

-----

Through this whole period of language-learning the child continues to

show his originality, his inventiveness. He is rarely at a loss, and

though the gaps in his verbal acquisitions are great he is very skilful

in filling them up. If, for example, our bright little linguist M., at

the age of one year eight and a half months, after being jumped by her

father, wants him to jump her mother also, she says, in default of the

word ‘jump,’ “Make mamma high”. A boy of twenty-seven months ingeniously

said, ‘It rains off,’ for ‘The rain has left off’. Forms are sometimes

combined, as when a boy of three years three months used ‘my lone,’

‘your lone,’ for ‘me alone’ or ‘by myself,’ ‘you alone’ or ‘by

yourself’. Another girl, two years ten months, said, ‘No two ’tatoes

left,’ meaning ‘only one potato is left’. Pleonasms occur in abundance,

as when a boy of two would say, ‘Another one bicca (biscuit),’ and,

better still, ‘another more’.

_Getting at our Meanings._

There is one part of this child’s work of learning our language of which

I have said hardly anything, _viz._, the divining of the verbal content,

of the meaning we put or try to put into our words. A brief reference to

this may well bring this study of childish linguistics to a close.

The least attention to a child in the act of language-learning will show

how much of downright hard work goes to the understanding of language.

If we are to judge by the effort required we might say that the child

does as much in deciphering his mother-tongue as an Oriental scholar in

deciphering a system of hieroglyphics. Just think, for example, how many

careful comparisons the small child-brain has to carry out, comparisons

of the several uses of the word by others in varying circumstances,

before he can get anything approaching to a clear idea, answering even

to such seemingly simple words as ‘clean,’ ‘old’ or ‘clever’. The way in

which inquiring children plague us with questions of the form, ‘What

does such and such a word mean?’ sufficiently shows how much

thought-activity goes in the trying to get at meanings. This difficulty,

moreover, persists, reappearing in new forms as the child pushes his way

onwards into the more tangled tracts of the lingual terrain. It is felt,

and felt keenly, too, when most of the torments of articulation are over

and forgotten. Many of us can remember how certain words haunted us as

uncanny forms into the nature of which we tried hard, but in vain, to

penetrate.

Owing to these difficulties the little learner is always drifting into

misunderstanding of words. Such misapprehensions will arise in a passive

way by the mere play of association in attaching the word especially to

some striking feature or circumstance which is apt to present itself

when the word is used in the child’s hearing. In this way, for example,

general terms may become terribly restricted in range by the

incorporation of accidentals into their meaning, as when a Sunday school

scholar rendered the story of the good Samaritan by saying that a

gentleman came by and poured some paraffin (_i.e._, oil) over the poor

man. A word may have its meaning funnily transformed by such associative

suggestions, as when a little girl, being told that a thing was a

secret, remarked, ‘Well, mamma, ’ou (you) can whisper it in my ear’. As

this example shows, a child in his ‘concreting’ fashion tries to get

sensible realities out of our names. A mask was called by a boy of six a

‘grimace,’ this abstract name standing to his mind for the grinning

face. A like tendency shows itself in the following quaint story. A boy

and a girl, twins, had been dressed alike. Later on the boy was put into

a ‘suit’. A lady asked the girl about this time whether they were not

the twins, when she replied: ‘No, we _used_ to be’. ‘Twin’ was

inseparably associated in her mind with the similarity in dress. A

somewhat similar effect of association of ideas is seen in the quaint

request of the little girl M. that her mamma should ‘smell’ the pudding

and make it cool. The action of bringing the face near an object yet so

as not to touch it was associated with smelling, as in the little girl

who, according to Mr. Punch, had her sense of propriety shocked by some

irreverent person who did not “smell his hat” when he took his seat in

church. Moral expressions get misunderstood in much the same manner. A

little girl of three and a half years, pretending that her mother was

her little girl, said: ‘You mustn’t do anything _on purpose_’. The usual

verbal context of this highly-respectable phrase (_e.g._, ‘You did it on

purpose’) had in the child’s mind given it a naughty meaning.

With these losings of the verbal road through associative by-paths may

be taken the host of misapprehensions into which children are apt to

fall through the ambiguities of our words and expressions, and our short

and elliptical modes of speaking. Thus an American child, noting that

children were ‘half price’ at a certain show, wanted his mother to get a

baby now that they were cheap.[116] With this may be compared the

following: Jean Ingelow tells us she can well remember how sad she was

made by her father telling her one day after dancing her on his knee

that he must put her down as he ‘had a bone in his leg’.[117] Much

misapprehension arises, too, from our figurative use of language, which

the little listener is apt to interpret in a very literal way. It would

be worth knowing what odd renderings the child-brain has given to such

expressions as ‘an upright man,’ ‘a fish out of water,’ and the like.

-----

Footnote 116:

Worcester Collection, p. 21.

Footnote 117:

_Cf._ the account Goltz gives of the anxiety he felt as a child on

hearing that his uvula (zapfen) had ‘fallen down,’ _op. cit._, p. 261.

-----

In addition to these comparatively passive misapprehensions there are

others which are the outcome of an intellectual effort, the endeavour to

penetrate into the mystery of some new and puzzling words or expression.

Many of us have had our special horror, our _bête noire_ among words,

which tormented us for months and years. I remember how I was plagued by

the word ‘wean,’ the explanation of which was very properly, no doubt,

denied me by the authorities, and by what quaint fancies I tried to fill

in a meaning.

As with words, so with whole expressions and sayings. It was a natural

movement of childish thought when a little school-girl answered the

question of the Inspector, ‘What is an average?’ by saying ‘What the hen

lays eggs on’. She had heard her mother say, “The hen lays so many eggs

‘on the average’ every week,” and had no doubt imagined a little myth

about this ‘average’. Again, most of us know what queer renderings the

child-mind has given to Scripture language. Mr. James Payn tells us that

he knew a boy who for years substituted for the words, ‘Hallowed be thy

name,’ ‘Harold be thy name’.[118] In this and similar cases it is not,

as might be supposed, defective hearing—children hear words as a rule

with great exactness—it is the impulse to give a familiar and

significant rendering to what is strange and meaningless.[119] A friend

of mine when a boy was accustomed on hearing the passage, ‘If I say

peradventure the darkness shall cover me,’ etc., to insert a pause after

‘peradventure,’ apprehending the passage in this wise: "If I say

‘Peradventure!’—the darkness," etc. In this way he turned the mysterious

‘peradventure’ into a mystic ‘open sesame,’ and added a thrilling touch

of magic to the passage. My friend’s daughter tells me that on hearing

the passage, “I ... visit the sins of the fathers upon the children unto

the third and fourth generation, ... and show mercy unto thousands,” she

construed the strange word ‘generation’ to mean an immense number like

‘billion,’ and was thus led to trouble herself about God’s seeming to be

more cruel than kind.[120]

-----

Footnote 118:

In the _Illustrated London News_, 30th June, 1894.

Footnote 119:

Of course defective auditory apprehension may assist in these cases.

Goltz gives an example from his own childhood. He took the words

“Namen nennen Dich nicht” to be “Namen nenne Dich nicht,” and was

sorely puzzled at the idea of bidding a name not to name itself.

Footnote 120:

Psalm cxxxix. and Second Commandment, Prayer-book version.

-----

In some cases, too, where the language is simple enough a child’s brain

will find our meaning unsuitable and follow a line of interpretation of

its own. Mr. Canton relates that his little heroine, who knew the lines

in _Strumpelpeter_—

The doctor came and shook his head,

And gave him nasty physic too—

was told that she would catch a cold, and that she at once replied, “And

will the doctor come and shook my head?”[121] It was so much more

natural to suppose that when the doctor came and did something this was

carried out on the person of the patient.

-----

Footnote 121:

_The Invisible Playmate_, p. 35.

-----

There is nothing more instructive in this connexion than the talk of

children among themselves about words. They build up quaint speculations

about meanings, and try their hand bravely at definitions. Here is an

example: A boy of five was instructing his comrade as to the puzzling

word ‘home-sick’. He did it in quite a scientific fashion. “It’s like

sea-sick, you know: you are sea-sick when you are sick at sea, and so

you’re home-sick when you’re sick at home”.

There is something of this same desire to get behind words in children’s

word-play, as we call it, their discovery of odd affinities in verbal

sounds, and their punning. Though no doubt this contains a genuine

element of childish fun, it betokens a more serious trait also, an

interest in word-sounds as such, and a curiosity about their origin and

purpose. It is difficult for grown-up people to go back in thought to

the attitude of the child-mind towards verbal sounds. Just as children

show ‘the innocence of the eye’ in seeing the colours of objects as they

are and not as our habits of interpretation tend to make them, so they

show an innocence of the ear, catching the intrinsic sensuous qualities

of a word or a group of words, in a way which has become impossible for

us.

This half-playful, half-serious scrutiny of word-sounds leads to the

attempt to find by analysis and analogy a familiar meaning in strange

words. For example, a little boy about four years old heard his mother

speak of nurse’s neuralgia, from which she had been suffering for some

time. He thereupon exclaimed, ‘I don’t think it’s _new_ ralgia, I call

it _old_ ralgia’. A child called his doll ‘Shakespeare’ because its

spear-like legs could be shaken. Another boy of three explained

‘gaiters’ as things ‘to go out of the gate with’. Another said that the

‘Master’ which he prefixed to his name meant that he was master of his

dog. A little girl in her third year called ‘anchovies’ ‘ham-chovies’

‘mermaid’ ‘worm-maid,’ ‘whirlwind’ ‘world-wind,’ ‘gnomes’ ‘no-mans’

(un-menschen), taking pleasure apparently in bringing some familiar

element—even when this seems to other ears at least not very

explanatory—into the strange jumble of word-sound that surrounded her. A

child may know that he is ‘fooling’ in such cases, yet the word-play

brings a certain satisfaction, which is at least akin to the pleasure of

the older linguist.

This quasi-punning transformation of words is curiously like what may be

called folk-etymology, where a foreign word is altered by a people so as

to be made to appear significant and suitable for its purpose, as in the

oft-quoted forms ‘sparrow grass’ (asparagus) and ‘cray-fish’ (from the

French écrevisse, _cf._ the O. H. German Krebiz), where the attempt to

suit the form to the thing is still more apparent.[122] When, for

example, a boy calls a holiday a ‘hollorday,’ because it is a day ‘to

holloa in,’ we may say that he is reflecting the process by which adults

try to put meaning into strange words, as when a cabman I overheard a

few days ago spoke about putting down _ash_phalt (for ‘asphalt’). Some

children carry out such transformation and invention of derivation on a

large scale, often resorting to pretty myths, as when the butterflies

are said to make butter, or to eat butter, grasshoppers to give grass,

honeysuckles to yield all the honey, and so forth.[123]

-----

Footnote 122:

The other form of the word, ‘craw-fish,’ seems a still more ingenious

example of folk-etymology.

Footnote 123:

These last are taken from a good list of children’s punnings in Dr.

Stanley Hall’s article, “The Contents of Children’s Minds”.

-----

A child will even go further, and, prying into the forms of gender,

invent explanatory myths in which words are personified and sexualised.

Thus a little boy of five years and three months who had learned German

and Italian as well as English was much troubled about the gender of the

sun and moon. So he set about myth-making on this wise: “I suppose

people[124] think the sun is the husband, the moon is the wife, and all

the stars the little children, and Jupiter the maid”. A German girl of

six was thus addressed by her teacher: “‘Der’ ist männlich; Was sind

‘Die’ und ‘Das’?” To which she replied prettily: "Die ist dämlich

(_i.e._, ‘ladyish’) und das ist kindlich". The tendency to attribute

differences of sex and age to names observable in this last is seen in

other ways. An Italian child asked why ‘barba’ (beard) was not called

‘barbo’. With this may be compared the pretty myth of another Italian

child that ‘barca’ (boat) was the little girl of ‘barcainolo’

(boatman).[125]

-----

Footnote 124:

That is, I take it, the majority, _viz._, Italians and English.

Footnote 125:

Both of these are given by Paola Lombroso in the work already quoted.

-----

One other characteristic feature in the child’s attitude towards words

must be touched on, because it looks like the opposite of the impulse to

tamper with words just dealt with. A child is a great stickler for

accuracy in the repetition of all familiar word-forms. The zeal of a

child in correcting others’ language, and the comical errors he will now

and again fall into in exercising his pedagogic function, are well known

to parents. Sometimes he shows himself the most absurd of pedants.

‘Shall I read to you out of this book, baby?’ asked a mother of her boy,

about two and a half years old. ‘No,’ replied the infant, ‘not _out_ of

dot book, but somepy inside of it.’ The same little stickler for verbal

accuracy, when his nurse asked him, ‘Are you going to build your bricks,

baby?’ replied solemnly, ‘We don’t build bricks, we make them and then

build _with_ them’. In the notes on the boy C. we find an example of how

jealously the child-mind insists on the _ipsissima verba_ in the

recounting of his familiar stories.

Are these little sticklers for verbal correctness, who object to

everything figurative in our language, who, when they learn that a

person or an animal has ‘lost his head,’ take the expression literally,

and who love nothing better than tying us down to literal exactness,

themselves given to ‘word-play’ and verbal myth-making, or have we here

to do with two varieties of childish mind? My observations do not enable

me to pronounce on this point.

I have in this essay confined myself to some of the more common and

elementary features of the child’s linguistic experience. Others present

themselves when the reading stage is reached, and the new strange

stupid-looking word-symbol on the printed page has to do duty for the

living sound, which for the child, as we have seen, seems to belong to

the object and to share in its life. But this subject, tempting as it

is, must be left. And the same must be said of those special

difficulties and problems which arise for the child-mind when two or

more languages are spoken. This is a branch of child-linguistics which,

so far as I know, has never been explored.

VI.

SUBJECT TO FEAR.

_Children’s Sensibility._

In passing from a study of children’s ideas to an investigation of their

feelings, we seem to encounter quite another kind of problem. A child

has the germs of ideas long before he can give them clear articulate

expression; and, as we have seen, he has at first to tax his ingenuity

in order to convey by intelligible signs the thoughts which arise in his

mind. For the manifestation of his feelings of pleasure and pain, on the

other hand, nature has endowed him with adequate expression. The states

of infantile discontent and content, misery and gladness, pronounce

themselves with a clearness and an emphasis which leave no room for

misunderstanding.

This full frank manifestation of feeling holds good more especially of

those states of bodily comfort and discomfort which make up the first

rude experiences of life. It is necessary for the child’s preservation

that he should be able to announce by clear signals the oncoming of his

cravings and of his sufferings, and we all know how well nature has

provided for this necessity. Hence the fulness with which infant

psychology has dealt with this first chapter of the life of feeling.

Preyer, for example, gives a full and almost exhaustive epitome of the

various shades of infantile pleasure and pain which grow out of this

life of sense and appetite, and has carefully described their

physiological accompaniments and their signatures.[126]

-----

Footnote 126:

_Op. cit._, Cap. 6 and 13.

-----

When we pass from these elementary forms of pleasure and pain to the

rudiments of emotion proper, as the miseries of fear, the sorrows and

joys of the affections, we have still, no doubt, to do with a mode of

manifestation which, on the whole, is direct and unreserved to a

gratifying extent. A child of three is delightfully incapable of the

skilful repressions, and the yet more skilful simulations of emotion

which are easy to the adult.[127] Yet frank and transparent as is the

first instinctive utterance of feeling, it is apt to get checked at an

early date, giving place to a certain reserve. So that, as we know from

published reminiscences of childhood, a child of six will have learnt to

hide some of his deepest feelings from unsympathetic eyes.

-----

Footnote 127:

This does not apply to older children. As Tolstoi’s book, _Childhood,

Boyhood and Youth_, tells us, a boy of twelve may be much given to

straining after feelings which he thinks he ought to experience.

-----

This shyness of the young heart, face to face with old and strange ways

of feeling, exposed to ridicule if not to something worse, makes the

problem of registering the pulsations of its emotions more difficult

than it at first seems. As a matter of fact we are still far from

knowing the precise range and depth of children’s feelings. This is seen

plainly enough in the quite opposite views which are entertained of

childish sensibility, some describing it as restricted and obtuse,

others as morbidly excessive. Such diversity of view may no doubt arise

from differences in the fields of observation, since, as we know,

children differ hardly less than adults perhaps in breadth and fineness

of emotional susceptibility. Yet I think that this contrariety of view

points further to the conclusion that we are still far from sounding

with finely measuring scientific apparatus the currents of childish

emotion.

It seems, then, to be worth while to look further into the matter in the

hope of gaining a deeper and fuller insight, and as a step in this

direction I propose to inquire into the various forms and the causes of

one of the best marked and most characteristic of children’s

feelings—namely, fear.

That fear is one of the characteristic feelings of the child needs no

proving. It seems to belong to these wee, weakly things, brought face to

face with a new strange world, to tremble. They are naturally timid, as

all that is weak and ignorant in nature is apt to be timid.

I have said that fear is well marked in the child. Yet, though it is

true that fully developed fear or terror shows itself by unmistakable

signs, there are many cases where it is difficult to say whether the

child is the subject of this feeling. Thus it is doubtful whether the

tremblings and disturbances of respiration which are said to betray fear

in the new-born infant are a full expression of this state.[128] Again,

the reflex movement of a start on hearing a sound hardly amounts to the

full reaction of fear, though it is akin to it.[129] A child may,

further, show a sort of æsthetic dislike for an ugly form or sound,

turning away in evident aversion, and yet not be afraid in the full

sense. Fear proper betrays itself in the stare, the grave look, and in

such movements as turning away and hiding the face against the nurse’s

or mother’s shoulder, and sometimes in covering it with the hands. In

severer forms it leads to trembling and to wild shrieking. Changes of

colour also occur. It is commonly said that great fear produces

paleness; but according to one of my correspondents who has had

considerable experience, a child may show the feeling by his face

turning scarlet. Fear, if not very intense, leads to voluntary

movements, as turning away, putting the object aside, or moving away. In

its more violent forms, however, it paralyses the child. It is desirable

that parents should carefully observe and describe the first signs of

fear in their children.[130]

-----

Footnote 128:

Perez regards these as signs of fear, and points out that tremulous

movements may occur in the fœtus (_L’Education dès le berceau_, p.

94).

Footnote 129:

For an account of this reflex, see Preyer, _op. cit._, Cap. 10, 176.

Footnote 130:

I know of no good account of the manifestations of childish fear.

Mosso’s book, _La Peur_, chap. v. and following, will be found most

useful here.

-----

_Startling Effect of Sounds._

It may be well to begin our study of fear by a reference to the effect

of startling. As is well known, sudden and loud sounds, as that of a

door banging, will give a shock to an infant in the first weeks of life,

which though not amounting to fear is its progenitor. A clearer

manifestation occurs when a new and unfamiliar sound calls forth the

grave look, the trembling lip, and possibly the fit of crying. Darwin

gives an excellent example of this. He had, he tells us, been accustomed

to make all sorts of sudden noises with his boy, aged four and a half

months, which were well received; but one day having introduced a new

sound, that of a loud snoring, he found that the child was quite upset,

bursting out into a fit of crying.[131]

-----

Footnote 131:

_Mind_, vol. ii., p. 288.

-----

As this incident suggests, it is not every new sound which is thus

disconcerting to the little stranger. Sudden sharp sounds of any kind

seem to be especially disliked, as those of a dog’s bark. The child M.

burst out crying on first hearing the sound of a baby rattle; and she

did the same two months later on accidentally ringing a hand bell.

Louder and more voluminous sounds, too, are apt to have an alarming

effect. The big noise of a factory, of a steam-ship, of a passing train,

are among the sounds assigned by my correspondents as causes of this

early startling and upsetting effect. A little girl when taken into the

country at the age of nine months, though she liked the animals she saw

on the whole, showed fear by seeking shelter against the nurse’s

shoulder, on hearing the bleating of the sheep. So strong is this effect

of suddenness and volume of sound that even musical sounds often excite

some alarm at first. ‘He (a boy of four months) cried when he first

heard the piano,’ writes one lady, and this is but a sample of many

observations. A child of five and a half months showed such a horror of

a banjo that he would scream if it were played or only touched. Preyer’s

boy at sixteen months was apparently alarmed when his father, in order

to entertain him, produced what seems to us a particularly pure musical

tone by rubbing a drinking-glass. He remarks that this same sound had

been produced when the child was four months old without any ill

effects.[132]

-----

Footnote 132:

_Op. cit._, p. 131.

-----

This last fact suggests that such shrinkings from sound may be developed

at a comparatively late date. This idea is supported by other

observations. “From about two years four months (writes a mother) to the

present time (two years eleven months), he has shown signs of fear of

music. At two years five months he liked some singing of rounds, but

when a fresh person with a stronger voice than the rest joined, he

begged the singer to stop. Presently he tolerated the singing as long as

he might stand at the farthest corner of the room.” This child was also

about the same time afraid of the piano, and of the organ, when played

by his mother in a church.

It is worth noting that animals show a similar dread of musical sounds.

I took a young cat of about eight weeks in my lap and struck some chords

not loudly on the piano. It got up, moved uneasily from side to side,

then bolted to the corner of the room and seemed to try to get up the

walls. Dogs, too, certainly seem to be put out, if not to experience

fear, at the music of a brass band.

It is sometimes supposed that this startling effect of loud sounds is

wholly an affair of nervous disturbance:[133] but the late development

of the repugnance in certain cases seems to show that this is not the

only cause at work. Of course a child’s nervous organisation may through

ill health become more sensitive to this disturbing effect; and, as the

life of Chopin tells us, the delicate organisation of a future musician

may be specially subject to these shocks. Yet I suspect that vague alarm

at the unexpected and unknown takes part here. There is something

uncanny to the child in the very production of sound from a silent

thing. A banjo lying now inert, harmless, and then suddenly firing off a

whole gamut of sound may well shock a small child’s preconceptions of

things. The second time that fear was observed in one child at the age

of ten months, it was excited by a new toy which squeaked on being

pressed.[134] This seems to be another example of the disconcerting

effect of the unexpected. In other cases the alarming effect of the

mystery is increased by the absence of all visible cause. One little boy

of two years used to get sadly frightened at the sound of the water

rushing into the cistern which was near his nursery. The child was

afraid at the same time of thunder, calling it ‘water coming’.

-----

Footnote 133:

This seems to be the view of Perez: _The First Three Years of

Childhood_ (English translation), p. 64.

Footnote 134:

Observation of F. H. Champneys, _Mind_, vol. vi., p. 106.

-----

I am far from saying that all children manifest this fear of sounds.

Miss Shinn points out that her niece was from the first pleased with the

piano, and this is no doubt true of many children. Children behave very

differently towards thunder, some being greatly disturbed by it, others

being rather delighted. Thus Preyer’s boy, who was so ignominiously

upset by the tone of the drinking-glass, laughed at the thunderstorm;

and we know that the little Walter Scott was once found during a

thunderstorm lying on his back in the open air clapping his hands and

shouting “Bonnie, bonnie!” at the flashes of lightning. It is possible

that in such cases the exhilarating effect of the brightness counteracts

the uncanny effect of the thunder. More observations are needed on this

point.

A complete explanation of these early vague alarms of the ear may as yet

not be possible. Children show in the matter of sound capricious

repugnances which it is exceedingly difficult to account for. They seem

sometimes to have their pet aversions like older folk. Yet I think that

a general explanation is possible.

To begin with, then, it is probable that in many of these cases,

especially those occurring in the first six months, we have to do with

an organic phenomenon, with a sort of jar to the nervous system. To

understand this we have to remember that the ear, in the case of man at

least, is the sense-organ through which the nervous system is most

powerfully and profoundly acted on. Sounds seem to go through us, to

pierce us, to shake us, to pound and crush us. A child of four or six

months has a nervous organisation still weak and unstable, and we should

naturally expect loud sounds to produce a disturbing effect on it.

To this it is to be added that sounds have a way of taking us by

surprise, of seeming to start out of nothing; and this aspect of them,

as I have pointed out above, may well excite vague alarm in the small

creatures to whom all that is new and unlooked for is apt to seem

uncanny. The fact that most children soon lose their fear by getting

used to the sounds seems to show how much the new and the mysterious has

to do with the effect.

Whether heredity plays any part here, _e.g._, in the fear of the dog’s

barking and other sounds of animals, seems to me exceedingly doubtful.

This point will, however, come up for closer consideration presently,

when we deal with children’s fear of animals.

Before considering the manifold outgoings of fear produced by

impressions of the eye, we may glance at another form of early

disturbance which has some analogy to the shock-like effects of certain

sounds. I refer here to the feeling of bodily insecurity which appears

very early when the child is awkwardly carried, or let down

back-foremost, and later when he begins to walk. One child in her fifth

month was observed when carried to hold on to the nurse’s dress as if

for safety. And it has been noticed by more than one observer that on

dandling a baby up and down in one’s arms, it will on descending, that

is when the support of the arms is being withdrawn, show signs of

discontent in struggling movements.[135] Bell, Preyer, and others regard

this as an instinctive form of fear. Such manifestations may, however,

be merely the result of sudden and rude disturbances of the sense of

bodily ease which attends the habitual condition of adequate support. A

child accustomed to lie in a cradle, on the floor, or on somebody’s lap,

might be expected to be put out when the supporting mass is greatly

reduced, as in bad carrying, or wholly removed, as in quickly lowering

him backwards. The fear of falling, which shows itself during the first

attempts to stand, comes, it must be remembered, as an accompaniment of

a new and highly strange situation. The first experience of using the

legs for support must, one supposes, involve a profound change in the

child’s whole bodily consciousness, a change which may well be

accompanied with a sense of disturbance. Not only so, it comes after a

considerable experience of partial fallings, as in trying to turn over

when lying, half climbing the sides of the cradle, etc., and still

harder bumpings when the crawling stage is reached. These would, I

suspect, be quite sufficient to produce the timidity which is observable

on making the bolder venture of standing.[136]

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Footnote 135:

See the quotations from Sir Ch. Bell, Perez, _First Three Years of

Childhood_, p. 63.

Footnote 136:

Preyer seems to regard this as instinctive. _Op. cit._, p. 131.

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_Fear of Visible Things._

Fears excited by visual impressions come later than those excited by

sounds. The reason of this seems pretty obvious. Visual sensations do

not produce the strong effect of nervous shock which auditory ones

produce. Let a person compare the violent and profound jar which he

experiences on suddenly hearing a loud sound, with the slight

surface-agitation produced by the sudden movement of an object across

the field of vision. The latter has less of the effect of nervous jar

and more of the characteristics of fear proper, that is, apprehension of

evil. We should accordingly expect that eye-fears would only begin to

show themselves in the child after experience had begun its educative

work.[137]

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Footnote 137:

M. Perez (_op. cit._, p. 65) calls in the evolution hypothesis here,

suggesting that the child, unlike the young animal, is so organised as

to be more on the alert for dangers which are near at hand (auditory

impressions) than for those at a distance (visual impressions). I

confess, however, that I find this ingenious writer not quite

convincing here.

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At the outset it is well, as in the case of the ear-fears, to keep

before us the distinction between a mere dislike to a sensation and a

true reaction of fear. We shall find that children’s quasi-æsthetic

dislikes to certain colours may readily simulate the appearance of

fears.

Among the earliest manifestations of fear excited by visual impressions

we have those called forth by the presentation of something new and

strange, especially when it involves a rupture of customary

arrangements. Although children love and delight in what is new, their

disposition to fear is apt to give to new and strange objects a

disquieting, if not distinctly alarming character. This apprehension

shows itself as soon as a child has begun to be used or accustomed to a

particular state of things.

Among the more disconcerting effects of a rude departure from the

customary, we have that of change of place. At first the infant betrays

no sign of disturbance on being carried into a new room. But when once

it has grown accustomed to a certain room it will feel a new one to be

strange, and eye its features with a perceptibly anxious look. This

sense of strangeness in place sometimes appears very early. The little

girl M., on being taken at the age of four months into a new nursery,

“looked all round and then burst out crying”. This feeling of uneasiness

may linger late. A boy retained up to the age of three years eight

months the fear of being left alone in strange hotels or lodgings. Yet

entrance on a new abode does not by any means always excite this

reaction. A child may have his curiosity excited, or may be amused by

the odd look of things. Thus one boy on being taken at the age of

fifteen months to a fresh house and given a small plain room looked

round and laughed at the odd carpet. Children even of the same age

appear in such circumstances to vary greatly with respect to the

relative strength of the impulses of fear and curiosity.

How different children’s mental attitude may be towards the new and

unfamiliar is illustrated by some notes on a boy sent me by his mother.

This child, “though hardly ever afraid of strange people or places, was

very much frightened as a baby _of familiar things seen after an

interval_”. Thus “at ten months he was excessively frightened on

returning to his nursery after a month’s absence. On this occasion he

screamed violently if his nurse left his side for a moment for some

hours after he got home, whereas he had not in the least objected to

being installed in a strange nursery.” The mother adds that “at thirteen

months, his memory having grown stronger, he was very much pleased at

coming to his home after being away a fortnight”. This case looks

puzzling enough at first, and seems to contradict the laws of infant

psychology. Perhaps the child’s partial recognition was accompanied by a

sense of the uncanny, like that which we experience when a place seems

familiar to us though we have no clear recollection of having seen it

before.

What applies to places applies also to persons: a sudden change of

customary human surroundings by the arrival of a stranger on the scene

is apt to trouble the child.

At first all faces seem alike for the child. Later on unfamiliar faces

excite something like a grave inquisitorial scrutiny. Yet, for the first

three months, there is no distinct manifestation of a fear of strangers.

It is only later, when attachment to human belongings has been

developed, that the approach of a stranger, especially if accompanied by

a proposal to take the child, calls forth clear signs of displeasure and

the shrinking away of fear. Preyer gives the sixth and seventh months as

the date at which his boy began to cry at the sight of a strange face.

In one set of notes sent me it was remarked that a child of four and a

half months would cry on being nursed by a stranger. To be nursed by a

stranger, however, is to have the whole baby-world revolutionised;

little wonder then that it should bring the feeling of strangeness and

homelessness.