This being so, the reason why a child imitates some of our language sounds correctly, others not, is somewhat doubtful. Thus it may arise because the articulatory apparatus has lost a part of its primordial skill; or because among the sounds which have to be reproduced and which prompt and guide the articulatory movements, some are better singled out and remembered than others; or again, because, owing to the unequal frequency of occurrence of certain sounds, the central nervous connections and corresponding mental association involved are established more quickly in the case of certain sounds than of others. It seems to be commonly held that the first is at all events the main reason, and this conclusion is supported by the fact that all children alike appear to find certain sounds (the labials) easy and others difficult. At the same time it is pretty certain that the environment lends material help in determining unknowingly what sounds shall be first grasped and reproduced. It may be added that the child's preferential interest in certain sounds and sound combinations, as well as in certain objects, as nurse, the dog, which it especially wants to name, plays a subordinate part in determining the common order of lingual progress as well as its variations in the case of different children. A lady writes to say that she is often surprised at the appearance of difficult sound combinations in the talk of her boy. When twenty-two months old he mastered the formidable task of saying "scissors," no doubt, as she remarks, owing to the special interest he had developed about this time in cutting up paper.
As already suggested, the liberties which the child allows himself in using our speech are of philological interest. The subject has been touched on by more than one writer. The phonetic reductions, substitutions, and transpositions of baby-language appear to have their counterpart in the changes which go on in the history of languages. Thus M. Egger points out that when a child says "crop" for "trop," "cravailler" for "travailler," he is reproducing the change which Latin words have undergone in becoming French, as when "tremere" is transmuted into "craindre." Pollock reminds us that when his daughter uses d for the unmanageable r, she is reversing the process by which the Bengalee transforms the Sanskrit d into an r sound. The reduplications again, and the use of certain final syllables, as the caressing diminutive "ie," appear to reflect habits of adult language. A further working out of those analogies belongs to the sciences of phonetics and linguistics.[1]
- ↑ Children's defective pronunciation has been elaborately compared by Preyer with abnormal speech defects (op. cit., 18 cap.). There seems, no doubt, to be a certain resemblance between the two; yet Preyer's attempts to show a complete parallelism are somewhat forced.
