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TRANSACTIONS

OF THE

AMERICAN PHILOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION,

1880.

I-A Contribution to Infantile Linguistic.

BY M. W. HUMPHREYS,

PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY.

In some recent works on this subject the rule has been adopted, in making up the child's vocabulary at a certain age, to admit only such words as were actually used during the last month of the period covered, and to form the list by writing each word down when it was used. I have not thought it best to place myself under such restrictions. What we want is the list of words of which the child has command; and if we are sure that it has command of a certain word, such word should not be excluded for the mere reason that the child did not happen to use it during an arbitrarily limited space of time. We could not, for instance, expect a child to happen to use the word "snow" between the 2d of May and the 2d of June.

In the present case, therefore, the following plan has been pursued: When the child was just two years old, aided by its mother I examined the words, one by one, in a dictionary, and marked such words as we were sure the child not only understood, but had spontaneously used, and still could use;

and whenever there was the slightest doubt, we drew the child into conversation with a view to eliciting the word in question, being careful not, to let it hear the word from us; and if we failed to elicit the word at once, we rejected it. In case of a concrete object, I thought it admissible to point at the object and ask, "What is that?" Sometimes the question was settled in regard to verbs also in a somewhat similar manner. For instance, it being a question whether the child had full use of a certain verb, I asked: "What did the kids do this morning?" Answer: "They ran and skipped about."

The vocabulary, then, which I give is that of a little girl, and contains the words, whether correctly pronounced or not, which she had full command of when she was just two years old.

In the works above alluded to, a classification of words according to their initial letters was made, in order to show that ease of pronunciation, especially of those letters, was an important factor in the formation of a vocabulary on the part of a child. But that classification is unscientific. To omit other faults, it is illogical and deceptive to follow the mere written characters of the English language. The list of words, for instance, beginning with e contains words whose initial sound is k, as 'cat,' or 8, as 'city,' or tsh (nearly), as 'chair.' So words seeming to begin with k really begin with n, as 'know,' 'knife.' The same is true of some words seeming to begin with g; and the g itself represents the g sound proper and also the sound of j, and some other letters exhibit analogous facts. In order, therefore, to arrive at any reliable conclusion, the classification should be based upon the initial sounds, and not upon the characters representing the sounds. In the present instance, however, no such classification has been made, for a reason which will be stated.

Although it is not my purpose to enter into any scientific discussion of the development of language in infants, but merely to contribute some material for the use of others, still I shall make a few general statements, some of which are rather of the nature of induction than of observation.

1. We should expect a priori that a child's vocabulary

would be affected by three considerations: (a) ease or difficulty of utterance, i. e., form; (b) simplicity of the idea, i. e., meaning; (c) frequency of use, i. e., familiarity. As to the first of these the form of the word-although it had some influence before the child was one year old, when she was two, it had ceased to have any effect whatever. She had, by that time, adopted certain substitutes for letters which she could not pronounce, and words containing these letters she employed as freely as if the substitutes had been the correct sounds. The other two influences-meaning and familiarity -are closely connected, the one leading to the other; that is, the simplest ideas are most frequently expressed. But in many instances, when two words are synonymous, one of them will be used exclusively by a child, because of the rarer employment of the other by persons speaking in the child's presence. Compare, for instance, sparkle and scintillate. And further, it may happen that some local circumstance renders a word familiar, which is generally unknown to children; as, for example, "crinoid"—a word which this child uses every day to designate sections of fossil crinoid stems which abound in neighboring gravel walks.

One phase of the simplicity of ideas should, perhaps, be treated independently as a fourth influence. The same idea may be conceived in a more or a less patent shape. An adjective, for instance, is more readily conceived than an adverb, and a substantive than an adjective. In the case under discussion nouns were most readily seized, then, in order, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns. Prepositions and conjunctions she began to employ early, but acquired them slowly. Inter jections are of two kinds, natural and conventional. The former, of course, she used to some extent from the beginning ("wah" for instance); the latter came rather late.

2. I proceed, in the second place, to give a brief history of the child's linguistic efforts, and I shall have facts to record which may surprise some; but in proportion as they are, or seem, unusual, just in that proportion are they important; for we are always in danger of generalizing from too limited observation, and then carrying with us through life a sort of

tant pis pour les faits confidence in our theories. A certain scientist in Virginia, attempting to illustrate a beautiful uniformity or periodicity of the annual rainfall, omitted the great rain of September 1870 as being "unprecedented and abnormal"; and one of our leading physicists once seemed inclined to the belief that I was mistaken, when I told him that in my dreams I could call up scenes and perform experiments, knowing that it was a dream. His theory of dreaming rendered this impossible. If, then, I state that a child at a certain period of its life called cat "ka," and dog, "og," from inability to pronounce t and d while it could pronounce k and g, let no man say that this is impossible, or even that it is 'unprecedented and abnormal," but let him revise his theory. In the child's linguistic efforts I observed four periods.

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(a.) When about four (4) months old she began a curious and amusing mimicry of conversation in which she so closely imitated the ordinary cadences, that persons in an adjacent room would mistake it for actual conversation. The articulation, however, was indistinct, and the vowel sounds obscure, and no attempt at separate words, whether real or imaginary, was made until she was six (6) months old, when she articulated most syllables distinctly without any apparent effort.

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(b.) When she was eight (8) months old, it was discovered that she knew by name every one in the house, as well as most of the objects in her room, and the parts of the body, especially of the face. She also understood simple sentences, such as, Where is the fire?' Where is the baby in the glass?'-to which she would reply by pointing. It was by similar questions that we discovered her knowledge of the names of persons and things. But some things she called by name; so that during this period (from 8 months on, for a few months) she used actual words as words, i. e., as representing ideas, pronouncing some final consonants indistinctly, but initial consonants all clearly except the linguals, th, t, d, n, 1.

(c.) But she now began a mimicry of language again, this time using real or imaginary words without reference to signification; and in her eleventh (11) month, she learned

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