The date at which the words heard from members of the family are for the first time clearly imitated, and the time when the words of the mother-tongue are first used independently, depends, undoubtedly, with children in sound condition, chiefly upon the extent to which people occupy themselves with the children. According to Heinr. Feldmann (De statu normali functionum corporis humani. Inaugural dissertation, Bonn, 1833, p. 3), thirty-three children spoke for the first time (prima verba fecerunt) as follows:

141516171810Month.
1819311Children.

Of these there could walk alone

89101112Month.
3246Children.

According to this, it is generally the case (the author presumably observed Rhenish children) that the first independent step is taken in walking several months earlier than the first word is spoken. But the statement of Heyfelder is not correct, that the average time at which sound children learn to walk ("laufen lernen") comes almost exactly at the completion of the twelfth month. The greater part of them are said by him to begin to walk a few days before or after the 365th day. R. Demme observed that the greater part began to walk between the twelfth and eighteenth months, and my inquiries yield a similar result. Sigismund's boy could run before he imitated words and gestures, and he did not yet form a sentence when he had more than sixty words at his command. Of two sisters, the elder could not creep in her thirteenth month, could walk alone for the first time in the fifteenth month, step over a threshold alone in the eighteenth, jump down alone from a threshold in the nineteenth, run nimbly in the twentieth; the younger, on the other hand, could creep alone cleverly at the beginning of the tenth month, even over thresholds, could take the first unsteady steps alone in the thirteenth, and stride securely over the threshold alone in the fifteenth. In spite of this considerable start the younger child was not, by a great deal, so far advanced in articulation, in repeating words after others, and in the use of words, in her fifteenth month, as the elder was in her fifteenth. The latter spoke before she walked, the former ran before she spoke (Frau von Strümpell). My child could imitate gestures (beckoning, clinching the fist, nodding the head) and single syllables (heiss), before he could walk, and did not learn to speak till after that; whereas the child observed by Wyma could stand firmly at nine months, and walk soon after, and he spoke at the same age. Inasmuch as in such statistical materials the important thing is to know what is meant by "speaking for the first time," whether it be saying mama, or imitating, or using correctly a word of the language that is to be spoken later, or forming a sentence of more than one word—and yet on these points data are lacking—we can not regard the laborious inquiries and collections as of much value. Children in sound condition walk for the most part before they speak, and understand what is said long before they walk. A healthy boy, born on the 13th of July, 1873, ran alone for the first time on the 1st of November, 1874, and formed his first sentence, hia muta ji ("Marie! die Mutter ist ausgegangen," ji = adieu) (Mary, mother has gone out), on the 21st of November, 1875, thus a full year later (Schulte).

More important, psychogenetically, are observations concerning the forming of new words with a definite meaning before learning to speak—words not to be considered as mutilations, imperfectly imitated or onomatopoetic forms (these, too, would be imitations), or as original primitive interjections. In spite of observations and inquiries directed especially to this point, I have not been able to make sure that any inventions of that sort are made before there has taken place, through the medium of the child's relatives, the first association of ideas with articulate sounds and syllables. There is no reason for supposing them to be made by children. According to the foregoing data, they are not thus made. All the instances of word-inventions of a little boy, communicated by Prof. S. S. Haldemann, of the University at Philadelphia, in his "Note on the Invention of Words" ("Proceedings of the American Philological Association," July 14, 1880) are, like those noted by Taine, by Holden (see below), by myself, and others, onomatopoetic (imitative, pp. 160, 91). He called a cow m, a bell tin-tin (Holden's boy called a church-bell ling-dong-mang [communicated in correspondence]), a locomotive tshu, tshu, the noise made by throwing objects into the water boom, and he extended this word to mean throw, strike, fall, spill, without reference to the sound. But the point of departure here, also, was the sound. In consideration of the fact that a sound formed in imitation of it, that is, a repetition of the tympanic vibrations by means of the vibrations of the vocal cords, is employed as a word for a phenomenon associated with the sound—that this is done by means of the faculty of generalization belonging to children that are intelligent but as yet without speech—it is perfectly allowable, notwithstanding the scruples and objections of even a Max Müller, to look for the origin of language in the imitation of sounds and the repetition of our own inborn vocal sounds, and so in an imitation. For the power of forming concepts must have manifested itself in the primitive man, as is actually the case in the infant, by movements of many sorts before articulate language existed. The question is, not whether the roots of language originated onomatopoetically or interjectionally, but simply whether they originated through imitation or not. For interjections, all of them, could in no way come to be joined together so as to be means of mutual understanding, i. e., words, unless one person imitated those of another. Now if the alalic child be tested as to whether he forms new words in any other way than by imitation and transformation of what he imitates, i. e., whether he forms them solely of his own ability, be it by the combination of impulsive sounds of his own or of sounds accidentally arising in loud expiration, we find no sure case of it. Sound combinations, syllables—and those not in the least imitated—there are in abundance, but that even a single one is, without the intervention of the persons about the child, constantly associated with one and the same idea (before other ideas have received their verbal designation—likewise by means of the members of the family—and have been made intelligible to the child), can not be shown to be probable. My observations concerning the word atta (p. 122 et al.) would tend in that direction, were it not that the atta, uttered in the beginning without meaning, had first got the meaning of "away," through the fact that atta was once said by somebody at going away.

So long as proof is wanting, we can not believe that each individual child discovers anew the fundamental fact of the expression of ideas by movements of the tongue; but we have to admit that he has inherited the faculty for such expression, and simply manifests it when he finds occasion for imitations.

The first person that has attempted to fix the number of all the words used by the child, independently, before the beginning of the third year of life (and these only), is an astronomer, E. S. Holden, director of the Observatory of the University at Madison, Wisconsin. His results in the case of three children have been recently published (in the "Transactions of the American Philological Association," 1887, pp. 58-68).

Holden found, by help of Webster's "Unabridged Dictionary," his own vocabulary to consist of 33,456 words, with a probable error of one per cent. Allowing a probable error of two per cent, his vocabulary would be comprised between the limits of 34,125 words and 32,787 words. A vocabulary of 25,000 words and over is, according to the researches of himself and his friends, by no means an unusual one for grown persons of average intelligence and education.

Holden now determined in the most careful manner the words actually used by two children during the twenty-fourth month of their lives. A friend in England ascertained the same for a third child. All doubtful words were rigidly excluded. For example, words from nursery rhymes were excluded, unless they were independently and separately used in the same way with words of daily and common use. In the first two cases the words so excluded are above 500 in number. Again, the names of objects represented in pictures were not included unless they were often spontaneously used by the children. The lists of words are presented in the order of their initial letters, because the ease or difficulty of pronouncing a word, the author is convinced, largely determines its early or late adoption. In this I can not fully agree with him, on the ground of my own experience (particularly since I have myself been teaching my child English, in his fourth year; he learns the language easily). It is not correct that the pronunciation rather than the meaning makes the learning of a word difficult. Thus, in all three of Holden's cases, the words that have the least easy initial (s) predominate; the child, however, avoided them and substituted easy ones. Holden makes no mention of this; and in his list of all the words used he puts together, strangely, under one and the same letter, without regard to their sound-(phonic) value, vocables that begin with entirely different sounds. Thus, e. g., under c are found corner (k), chair (tsch), cellar (s); under k, actually knee (n) and keep (k), and, under s, words that begin with the same s-sound as in cellar, e. g., soap, and also words beginning with the sch-sound, sugar, and with st, sw, sm, and many others. As the words of the three children are grouped, not according to the sounds with which they begin, but according to their initial letters, into twenty-six classes, the author's conclusions can not be admitted. The words must first all be arranged according to their initial sounds. When this task is accomplished, which brings no and know, e. g., into one class, wrap and rag into a second—whereas they were put in four different classes—then we find by no means the same order of succession that Holden gives. The author wrote to me, however, in 1882, that his oldest child understood at least 1,000 words more than those enumerated here, i. e., than those published by him, and that with both children facility of pronunciation had more influence in regard to the use of words than did the ease with which the words could be understood; this, however, does not plainly follow from the printed statements before me, as he admits. When the first-born child was captivated by a new word, she was accustomed to practice it by herself, alone, and then to come and employ it with a certain pride. The second child did so, too, only in a less striking manner. The boy, on the contrary, who was four years old in December, 1881, and who had no ear for music and less pride than his sisters, did not do as they did.