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]]
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.