You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
A most admirable and informative essay on the origin and development of language in the infant. From the author's point of view language can not be considered in any way as something which is suddenly added to the child's capacities at some particular time but must be conceived as something which has slowly evolved and differentiated from the very beginning. The earliest sounds of the infant are sounds which are expressive of comfort or discomfort as they are particularly indicated in the nasal discomfort and oral comfort sounds which are naturally expressed at the beginning by all infants and which in turn are evolved from the first activities of the muscles of the oral zone, those engaged primarily in sucking and perhaps also in respiration. These early physiological functions merge into these comfort and discomfort expressions and so the foundation is laid for what afterwards happens and what has to occur necessarily in accordance with these foundations.
“These meanings are not casually attached by adults to sound-groups casually chosen by them; nor even casually attached to those sounds which the child happens to utter spontaneously. They are the social stabilisation of meanings which already exist in the child's utterance.” (p. 134)
“The heard speech and the accompanying circumstances together form a unity for him, a pattern of events; and one element in this pattern—the heard speech—acquires a certain dominance, in that it plays an