William T. Preyer

“ But at twelve months, when he tries whether it is fast, he does not think of the key at all, and does not yet possess a single word.
An adult, before watering flowers with a watering-pot, will look to see whether there is water in it. The child of a year and a half, who has seen how watering is done, finds special pleasure in going from flower to flower, even with an empty watering-pot, and making the motions of pouring upon each one separately, as if water would really come out. ”

“ Of all the facts that have been established by me through the observation of the child in the first years of his life, the formation of concepts without language is most opposed to the traditional doctrines, and it is just this on which I lay the greatest stress.
It has been demonstrated that the human being, at the very beginning of his life, not only distinguishes pleasure and discomfort, but may also have single, distinct sensations. He behaves on the first day differently, when the appropriate sense-impressions exist, from what he does when they are lacking. ”

“ He says, "If a person who was looking out upon a wide and beautiful prospect could be in an instant wholly deprived of his intellect, then nothing of all the view would remain for him except the sensation of a very manifold reaction of his retina, which is, as it were, the raw material out of which his intellect created that view."
The new-born child has, as yet, no intellect, and therefore can not, as yet, at the beginning, see; he can merely have the sensation of light. ”

“ Understand shall in future apply only to the meaning of the word; hear—since it is simply the perceiving of a word through the hearing that we have in view—will relate to the sensuous impression. It is clear, then, that all children who can hear but can not yet speak, repeat many words without understanding them, and understand many words without being able to repeat them, as Kussmaul has already observed. ”

“ Precisely the epoch at which this takes place belongs to the most interesting in intellectual development. Like a pantomimist, the child, by means of his looks and gestures, and further by cries and by movements of all sorts, gives abundant evidence of his understanding and his desires, without himself speaking a single word. ”

“ All the positive faculties and qualities of the ape are wanting here; there is nothing of the psychology of the ape, but only the psychology of an imperfectly developed and deficient little child. Every characteristic is human; every single trait. I had the girl in my room a few months since, for hours together, and occupied myself with her; I never observed anything in her that reminds me even remotely of the psychological conditions of apes. She is a human being, in a low stage of development, but in no way deviating from the nature of humanity. ”

“ She grasps with animation at some human skulls that she sees on a table near her, and directs her look to charts on the walls. She puts her fingers into her nostrils, brushes her apron with both hands, polishes my watch, which I have offered her and she has seized, holds it to one ear, then to one of her father's ears, draws her mouth into a smile, seems to be pleased by the ticking, holds the watch to her father's other ear, then to her own other ear, laughs, and repeats the experiment several times. Her head is very mobile. ”

“ Least of all can one rely on the reports of nurses, attendants, and other persons not practiced in scientific observing. I have often, merely by a brief, quiet cross-examination, brought such persons to see for themselves the erroneous character of their statements, particularly in case these were made in order to prove how "knowing" the infants were. On the other hand, I owe to the mother of my child, who has by nature a talent for observation such as is given to few, a great many communications concerning his mental development which have been easily verified by myself. ”

“ It is surprising that the reproducing of what is said to him succeeds best directly after the cold bath in the morning, when the child has been screaming violently and has even been shivering, or when he is still screaming and is being rubbed dry, and, as if resigned to his fate, lies almost without comprehension. The will, it would seem, does not intrude here as a disturbing force, and echolalia manifests itself in its purity, as in the case of hypnotics. The little creature is subdued and powerless. ”

“ For there is hardly a better proof that thinking is not dependent on the language of words than the conduct of deaf-mutes, who express, indeed, many more concepts of unlike content in the same manner than any verbal language does—just as children with all their senses do before they possess a satisfactory stock of words—but who, by gesticulation and pantomime before receiving any instruction, demonstrate that concepts are formed without words. ”

“ In the earliest period and when the babbling monologues begin, the cavity of the mouth takes on an infinitely manifold variety of forms—the lips, tongue, lower jaw, larynx, are moved, and in a greater variety of ways than ever afterward. At the same time there is expiration, often loud expiration, and thus originates entirely at random sometimes one sound, sometimes another. The child hears sounds and tones new to him, hears his own voice, takes pleasure in it, and delights in making sounds, as he does in moving his limbs in the bath. ”

“ In the adult ideas generate new words, and the formation of new words does not cease so long as thinking continues; but in the child without speech new feelings and new ideas generate at first only new cries and movements of the muscles of the face and limbs, and, the further we look back into child-development proper, the greater do we find the number of the conditions expressed by one and the same cry. ”

“ Those born deaf are precisely the ones that show plainly how necessary hearing is for the acquirement of perfectly articulate speech. One who is deaf from birth does not even learn to speak half a dozen sounds correctly without assistance, and the loss of speech that regularly follows deafness coming on in children who have already learned to speak, shows how inseparably the learning and the development of perfect articulation are bound up with the hearing. Even the deafness that comes on in maturer years injures essentially the agreeable tone, often also the intelligibility, of the utterance. ”

“ We have here, then, a brain that scarcely deviates from the normal brain in volume, that possesses all the convolutions and fissures, seeming, perhaps, richer than the average brain in convolutions, and that is in every respect differentiated; and notwithstanding all this it approximates, in its whole structure, to the simian rather than to the human type. Had the brain been placed before me without my knowing its origin, I should have been perfectly justified in assigning this brain to an anthropoid ape standing somewhat nearer to man than does the chimpanzee. ”

“ But it is certainly of the first consequence, in regard to the development of the faculty of memory, whether the later experiences of the child have any characteristic in common with the earlier experiences. For many of these experiences no such agreement exists; nothing later on reminds us of the once existing inability to balance the head, or of the former inability to turn around, to sit, to stand, to walk, of the inborn difficulty of hearing, inability to accommodate the eye, and to distinguish our own body from foreign objects; hence, no man, and no child, remembers these states. ”

“ This doubling of syllables, involuntary and surely contrary to the will of the child, stands in remarkable contrast with the indolence he commonly shows in reproducing anything said, even when the fault is not to be charged to teasing, stubbornness, or inability. The child then finds more gratification in other movements than those of the muscles of speech. The babbling only, abounding in consonants, yields him great pleasure, particularly when it is laughed at, although it remains wholly void of meaning as language. ”

“ Now, however, the brainless living child that sucks, cries, moves arms and legs, and distinguishes pleasure from displeasure, has indisputably an individuality, an ego. We must, then, of necessity admit two egos in the child that has both cerebrum and spinal marrow, and that represents to himself his arm as good to taste of, as something to like. ”

“ No human being remembers how he learned his mother-tongue in early youth, and the whole human race has forgotten the origin of its articulate speech as well as of its gestures; but every individual passes perceptibly through the stage of learning to speak, so that a patient observer recognizes much as conformable to law. ”

“ On the whole, the infant or the young child already weaned must be placed higher at this stage of his mental development than a very intelligent animal, but not on account of his knowledge of language, for the dog also understands very well single words in the speech of his master, in addition to hunting-terms. He divines, from the master's looks and gestures, the meaning of whole sentences, and, although he has not been brought to the point of producing articulate sounds, yet much superior in this respect is the performance of the cockatoo, which learns all articulate sounds. ”

“ Through this manifold significance of a word, which is a substitute for a whole sentence, is exhibited a much higher activity of the intellect than appears in the mutilation and new formation of words having but one meaning to designate a sense-impression, for, although in the latter is manifested the union of impressions into perceptions and also of qualities into concepts, wherein an unconscious judgment is involved, yet a clear judgment is not necessarily connected with them. ”

“ He who has conscientiously observed the mental development of infants must come to the conclusion that the formation of ideas is not bound up with the learning of words, but is a necessary prerequisite for the understanding of the words to be learned first, and therefore for learning to speak. Long before the child understands even a single word, before he uses a single syllable consistently with a definite meaning, he already has a number of ideas which are expressed by looks and gestures and cries. ”

“ Hereditary we may, indeed, call the characteristic of humanity, speech; hereditary, also, is articulation in man, and the faculty of acquiring any articulate language is innate. But beyond this the tribal influence does not reach. If the possibility of learning to speak words phonetically is wanting because ear or tongue refuses, then another language comes in as a substitute—that of looks, gestures, writing, tactile images—then not Broca's center, but another one is generated. ”

“ But we find not only that the individual senses of the deaf-mute, his own observation and apprehension, are formative factors in the occurrences of sensation and perception, as is of course the case, but that the qualities of the objects observed by him, and associated, according to his individual tendencies, are also raised by him, through comparison, separation, grouping—through his own act, therefore—to general ideas, concepts, although as yet imperfect ones, and they are named and recognized again by peculiar signs intelligible to himself. ”

“ The sensuous impression that one ball makes is so different from that which two balls make, the given words one and two sound so differently, that we can not help wondering how one and two, and likewise three, four, five, are confounded with one another. ”

“ A child who shows by looks and gestures and actions that he understands single words, and who already pronounces correctly many words by imitation without understanding them, does not on this account stand higher intellectually than a sagaciously calculating yet speechless elephant or an Arabian horse, but because he already forms many more and far more complex concepts. ”

“ In performances of this kind, a superior understanding is not by any means exhibited, but a stronger memory and faculty of association. These associations are not, however, of a logical sort, but are habits acquired through training, and they may even retard the development of the intellect if they become numerous. For they may obstruct the formation, at an early period, of independent ideas, merely on account of the time they claim. Often, too, these artificial associations are almost useless for the development of the intellect. ”

“ In the twenty-seventh month the activity of thought manifests itself already in various ways. The independent ideas, indeed, move in a narrowly limited sphere, but their increasing number testifies to the development of the intellect. ”

“ So that the question whether a speech-center already exists in the alalic child must be answered in the negative; the center is formed only when the child hears speech, and, if he does not hear speech, no center is developed. In this case the ganglionic cells of the posterior third of the third frontal convolution are otherwise employed, or they suffer atrophy. In learning to speak, on the contrary, there is a continuous development, first of the sound-center, then of the syllable-center, then of the word-center and the dictorium. The brain grows through its own activity. ”

“ This very ability to learn, in the child born deaf, is greater than in the normal child, in respect to pantomime and gesture. If a child with his hearing had to grow up among deaf-mutes, he would undoubtedly learn their language, and would in addition enjoy his own voice without being able to make use of it; but he would probably be discovered, further on, without testing his hearing, by the fact that he was not quite so complete a master of this gesture-language as the deaf-mutes, on account of the diversion of his attention by sound. ”

“ The normal child, before he can speak, repeats sounds, syllables, words, if they are short, "mechanically," without understanding, as he imitates movements of the hands and the head that are made in his sight. Speaking is a movement-making that invites imitation the more because it can be strictly regulated by means of the ear. Anything more than regulation is not at first given by the sense of hearing, for those born deaf also learn to speak. ”

“ Long before the child's mechanism of articulation is so far developed that these expressions can be produced by him, the child manifests his understanding of them unequivocally by corresponding movements, by gestures and looks, by obedience.
No doubt this behavior varies in individual cases, inasmuch as in some few the imitative articulation may be to some extent earlier developed than the understanding. There are many children who even in their first year have a monkey-like knack at imitation and repeat all sorts of things like parrots without guessing the sense of them. ”