While there is this peculiar scientific interest in the first manifestations of the speech-faculty in the child, they are of a kind to lend themselves particularly well to a methodic and exact observation. Articulate sounds are sensible objects having well-defined characters which may be accurately noted and described where the requisite fineness of ear and quickness of perception are present. The difficulties are no doubt great here: but they are precisely the difficulties to sharpen the appetite of the true naturalist. Hence we need not wonder that early articulation fills a large place in the naturalist’s observation of infant life. Preyer, for example, devotes one of the three sections of his well-known monograph to this subject, and gives us a careful and elaborate account of the progress of articulation and of speech up to the end of the period dealt with (first three years).
Since these studies are especially concerned with the characteristics of the child after language has been acquired I shall not enter into the history of his rudimentary speech at any great length. At the same time, since language is a realm of activity in which the child betrays valuable characteristics long after the third year, it deserves a special study in this volume.
As everybody knows, long before the child begins to speak in the conventional sense he produces sounds. These are at first cries and wanting in the definiteness of true articulate sounds. Such cries are expressive, that is, utterances of changing conditions of feeling, pain and pleasure, and are also instinctive, springing out of certain congenital nervous arrangements by which feeling acts upon the muscular organs. This crying gradually differentiates itself into a rich variety of expressions for hunger, cold, pain, joy and so forth, of which it is safe to say that the majority of nurses and mothers have at best but a very imperfect knowledge.
These cries disclose from the first a germ of articulate sound, viz., according to Preyer an approach to the vowel sounds u (oo) and ä (Engl. a in ‘made’). This articulate element becomes better defined and more varied in the later cries, and serves in part to differentiate them one from the other. Thus a difference of shade in the a (in ‘ah’), difficult to describe, has been observed to mark off the cry of pleasure and of pain. Along with this articulate sounds begin to appear in periods of happy contentment under the form of infantile babbling or ‘la-la-ing’. Thus the child will bring out a string of a and other vowel sounds. In this baby-twittering the several vowel sounds of our tongue become better distinguishable, and are strung together in queer ways, as ai-ā-au-â. An attempt is made by Preyer and others to give the precise order of the appearance of the several vowel sounds. It is hardly to be expected that observers would agree upon a matter so difficult to seize and to describe; and this is what we find.[[60]] After allowing, however, for differences in the reading off, it seems probable that there is a considerable diversity in the order of development in the case of different children. This applies still more to the appearance of the consonantal sounds which long before the end of the sixth month become combined with the vowels into syllabic sounds, as pa, ma, mam, and so forth. Thus, though the labials b, p, m, seem to come first in most cases, they may be accompanied, if not preceded, by others, as the back open sound ch (in Scotch ‘loch’), or (according to Preyer and others) by the corresponding voiced sound, the hard g. Similarly, sounds as l and r, which commonly appear late, are said in some instances to occur quite early.[[61]] Attempts have been made to show that the order of sounds here corresponds with that of advancing physiological difficulty or amount of muscular effort involved. Yet apart from the fact just touched on, that the order is not uniform, it is very questionable whether the more common order obeys any such simple physiological law.
This primordial babbling is wonderfully rich and varied. According to Preyer it contains most, if not all the sounds which are afterwards used in speaking, and among these some which cause much difficulty later on. It is thus a wondrous contrivance of nature by which the child is made to rehearse months beforehand for the difficult performances of articulate speech. It is a preliminary trying of the vocal instrument throughout the whole of its register.
Though nurses are apt to fancy that in this pretty babbling the infant is talking to itself there is no reason to think that it amounts even to a rudiment of true speech. To speak is to use a sound intentionally as the sign of an idea. The babbling baby of five months cannot be supposed to be connecting all these stray sounds with ideas, if indeed it can be said to have as yet any definite ideas. The only signification which this primitive articulation can have is emotional. Undoubtedly, as we have seen, it grows out of expressive cries. Even the happy bubblings over of vowel sounds as the child lies on his back and ‘crows,’ may be said to be expressive of his happiness like the movements of arms and legs which accompany it. Yet it would be an exaggeration to suppose that the elaborate phonation is merely expressive, that all the manifold and subtle changes of sound are due to obscure variations of feeling.
The true explanation seems to be that the appearance of this infantile babbling, just like that of the movements of the limbs which accompany it, is the result of changes in the nervous system. As the centres of vocalisation get developed, motor impulses begin to play on the muscles of throat, larynx, and, later on, lips, tongue, etc., and in this way a larger and larger variety of sound and sound-combination is produced. Such phonation is commonly described as impulsive. It is instinctive, that is to say, unlearnt, and due to congenital nervous connexions; and at best it can only be said to express in its totality a mood or relatively permanent state of feeling.
As this impulsive articulation develops it becomes complicated by a distinctly intentional element. The child hears the sounds he produces and falls in love with them. From this moment he begins to go on babbling for the pleasure it brings. We see the germ of such a pleasure-seeking babbling in the protracted iterations of the same sound. The first reduplications and serial iterations, a-a, ma-ma, etc., may be due to physiological inertia, the mere tendency to move along any track that happens to be struck, the very same tendency which makes a prosy speaker go on repeating himself. At the same time there is without doubt in these infantile iterations a rudiment of self-imitation. That is to say, the child having produced a sound, as na or am, impulsively proceeds to repeat the performance[performance] in order to obtain a renewal of the sound-effect. This renewed impulse may be supposed further to bring with it a germ of the pleasure of iteration of sound, or assonance. The addition of a simple rhythmic character to the series of sounds is a further indication of its pleasure-seeking character. Indeed we have in this infantile ‘la-la-ing’ more a rudiment of song and music than of articulate speech. The rude vocal music of savages consists of a similar rhythmic threading of meaningless sounds in which as in this infantile song changes of feeling reflect themselves. We may best describe this infantile babbling then as voice-play and as rude spontaneous singing, the utterance of a mood, indulged in for the sake of its own delight, and serving by a happy arrangement of nature as a preliminary practice in the production of articulate or linguistic sounds.
Transition to Articulate Speech.
Let us now seek to understand how this undesigned trying of the articulate instrument passes into true significant articulation, how this speech-protoplasm develops into the organism that we call language. And here the question at once arises: Does the child tend to utilise the sounds thus acquired as signs apart from the influence of education, that is to say, of the articulate sounds produced by others and impressed as signs upon his attention? The question is not easy to answer owing to the early development of the imitative impulse and to the constant and all-pervading influence of education in the nursery. Yet I will offer a tentative answer.