The boy, at twenty months, told his father the following, with pretty long pauses and animated gestures: atten—beene—titten—bach—eine—puff—anna, i. e., "Wir waren im Garten, haben Beeren und Kirschen gegessen, und in den Bach Steine geworfen; dann kam Anna" (we were in the garden, ate berries and cherries, and threw stones into the brook; then Anna came).
The observations of Sigismund are remarkable for their objectivity, their clearness of exposition, and their accuracy, and they agree with mine, as may easily be seen, in many respects perfectly. Unfortunately, this excellent observer (long since deceased) did not finish his work. The first part only has appeared. Moreover, the statements as to the date of the first imitations (see pp. 83, 108, 109, 118, 121) are not wholly in accord with one another.
I. E. Löbisch, likewise a physician, in his "Entwickelungsgeschichte der Seele des Kindes" ("History of the Development of the Mind of the Child," Vienna, 1851, p. 68), says: "Naturally the first sound formed in the mouth, which is more or less open, while the other organs of speech are inactive, is the sound resembling a, which approximates sometimes more, sometimes less, nearly to the e and the o.[D]
"Of the consonants the first are those formed by closing and opening the lips: m, b, p; these are at first indistinct and not decidedly differentiated till later; then the m naturally goes not only before the a but also after it; b and p for a long time merely commence a syllable, and rarely close one until other consonants also have been formed. A child soon says pa, but certainly does not say ab until he can already pronounce other consonants also (p. 79).
"The order in which the sounds are produced by the child is the following: Of the vowels, first a, e, o, u, of course not well distinguished from a at the beginning; the last vowel is i. Of the consonants, m is the first, and it passes by way of the w into b and p. But here we may express our astonishment that so many writers on the subject of the order of succession of the consonants in the development of speech have assigned so late a date to the formation of the w; Schwarz puts it even after t, and before r and s. Then come d, t; then l and n; n is easily combined with d when it precedes d; next f and the gutturals h, ch, g, k, the g and k often confounded with d and t. S and r are regarded as nearly simultaneous in their appearance; the gutturals as coming later, the latest of them being ch. Still, there is a difference in this respect in different children. For many produce a sound resembling r among the first consonant sounds; so too ä, ö, ü; the diphthongs proper do not come till the last."
These statements of Löbisch, going, as they do, far beyond pure observation, can not all be regarded as having general validity. For most German children, at least, even those first adduced can scarcely claim to be well founded.
H. Taine (in the supplement to his book on "Intelligence," which appeared in a German translation in 1880) noted, as expressions used by a French child in the fifteenth month, papa, maman, tété (nurse, evidently a word taken from the word têter, "to nurse or suck at the breast"), oua-oua (dog, in all probability a word said for the child to repeat), koko (cock, no doubt from coq-coq, which had been said for the child), dada (horse, carriage, indicating other objects also, no doubt; a demonstrative word, as it is with many German children). Tem was uttered without meaning for two weeks; then it signified "give, take, look, pay attention." I suspect that we have here a mutilation of the strongly accentuated tiens, which had probably been often heard. As early as the fourteenth month, ham signified "I want to eat" (hamm, then am, might have had its origin in the echo of faim, as-tu faim? (are you hungry?)). At the age of three and a half months this child formed only vowels, according to the account; at twelve months she twittered and uttered first m-m, then kraaau, papa, with varying intonation, but spoke no word with a recognizable meaning. In the tenth month there was an understanding of some questions. For the child, when asked "Where is grandpapa?" smiled at the portrait of the grandfather, but not at the one of the grandmother, which was not so good a likeness. In the eleventh month, at the question "Where is mamma?" the child would turn toward her mother, and in like manner toward the father at the question, "papa"?
A second child observed by Taine made utterances that had intellectual significance in the seventh week, for the first time. Up to the age of five months ah, gue, gre (French) were heard; in the seventh month, also ata, ada.
In his reflections, attached to these and a few other observations of his own, Taine rightly emphasizes the great power of generalization and the peculiarity the very young child had of associating with words it had heard other notions than those common with us; but he ascribes too much to the child's inventive genius. The child guesses more than it discovers, and the very cases adduced (hamm, tem), on which he lays great weight, may be traced, as I remarked above parenthetically, to something heard by the child; this fact he seems to have himself quite overlooked. It is true, that in the acquirement of speech one word may have several different meanings in succession, as is especially the case with the word bébé (corresponding to the English word baby), almost universal with French children; it is not true that a child without imitation of sounds invents a word with a fixed meaning, and that, with no help or suggestion from members of the family, it employs its imperfectly uttered syllables (Lallsylben) consistently for designating its ideas.
Among the notes of Wyma concerning an English child ("The Mental Development of the Infant of To-day," in the "Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology," vii, Part I, pp. 62-69, London, April, 1881), the following, relating to the acquisition of speech, are to be mentioned: