Psychological Elements in Speech.: By Emil Fröschels, Ph.D., M.D. Professor of Speech, University of Vienna, Director of Speech Laboratories and Speech Clinics, University of Vienna and General Hospital, Vienna. In company with Prof. Dr. Ottmar Dittrich and Frau Dr. Ilka Wilheim. Translated from the German by Nils Ferre. Boston: Expression Company, 1932. 270 p.

Three of the five sections of this book are written by Professor Fröschels. These are the sections on "Aphasia", "Infant Speech", and "Folk Psychology". His discussion of aphasia includes all the usual theories and facts. The author himself inclines towards the Marie-Mourgue school of thought, which objects to too strict

localization of the "speech functions". He emphasizes the difference in the clinical picture of aphasia in persons of various degrees of antecedent intelligence and vocabulary. In the section on "Infant Speech" he leans heavily on the Sterns, Bühler, and other standard authors, and he proposes an original theory in regard to stuttering, summarized in the sentence: "Incipient development-stuttering is the external result of a cortical deficiency phenomenon." The section on "Folk Psychology" essentially follows Wundt. It includes the usual discussion of gesture language and imitation. The section on "Speech as a Psychophysiological Function" by Professor Dittrich includes a discussion of the relation of meaning and sound, which deals chiefly with the phenomena of inflection, the relation of sentences and words to thought, and the phylogenetic organic aspect of speech. The last section, "Speech from the Point of View of Individualistic Psychology" by Dr. Ilka Wilheim shows how words change their meaning during the ages through the influence of the psychological tendency to appraise qualities or persons as superior or inferior. The degradation of words corresponds to the social degradation of the objects to which they refer, particularly, the author thinks, members of the female sex. She also gives an interesting list of "organ terms" which express psychic states–"It takes one's breath away", "It turns one's stomach", etc.–as examples of the Adlerian "organ dialect" operating in everyday speech.

Though the discussions in this book are too compressed and too clouded by unnecessary or pedantic technical and pseudo-technical language, they are