Along with, this tendency to reduplication we see a disposition to use particular syllabic sounds, as the final "ie." Thus sugar becomes "sugie"; picture, "pickie"; and so forth. One child was so much in love with this syllable as to prefer it to the common repetition of sound in onomatopoetic imitation, naming the hen not "tuck-tuck," as one might expect, but "tuckie."
I have here given only a very rough account of children's first tentatives in the use of their mother tongue. As yet the facts do not admit of an exact general description. As already suggested, the seizing of the precise shade of an infantile vowel or consonant requires the finely trained, ear, and probably a good deal of this part of child observation will have to be reconsidered.[1]
The facts being as yet but imperfectly observed and classified, it would be premature to offer anything in the way of a complete and final explanation. A difficulty here arises from the circumstance already noted that, according to Preyer, the child in his spontaneous babbling produces most if not all of our common language sounds and others too. This may turn out to be an exaggeration; yet at any rate it is a fact that certain sounds, as l and r, which occur in the first impulsive babbling, appear to give difficulty later on. How comes this to pass? In order to open up the way to an answer we must look for a moment a little more closely at the process of imitative speech. The later linguistic utterance of a sound differs from and is a much more complex affair than the earlier and impulsive utterance. It is the result of a volition which involves a mental association between the ear's impression of a particular sound, or the idea answering to this, with the idea of the required vocal or articulatory action. Thus a child could not say "poo," in imitation of his nurse's "poo," till the hearing of this sound had got connected, by means of nervous attachments in the brain, with an idea or representation of what its larynx and lips have to do in uttering this sound "poo." Nor could he utter it alone in order to name an object until the idea of the sound had entered into this connection.
Now a child might go on hearing the sounds of others forever and never be able to speak, unless he happened by some fortunate circumstance to produce the requisite articulate movements and so find out how the several varieties of sound are obtained. And this is precisely what the early aimless and largely emotional babbling effects. It makes the child acquainted with his own articulate powers, their modifications, and the particular sound-effects which respectively follow these.
- ↑ One of the most painstaking attempts to describe infantile sounds with scientific exactness is that of Sir F. Pollock in his notes On an Infant's Progress in Language. Mind, vol. iii, p. 392 seq.
