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.
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’[‘geranium’], ‘burman’ for ‘laburnum’.
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]]
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.
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.