tion, that within the narrow space occupied
by the vocal apparatus we have a system of muscular mechanisms
which has within it, looking at it now as a whole, the same possibilities
of habit formation that we find in the remaining portion of bodily
musculature.... It is probable that in a few years we shall undertake
the study of such habits from exactly the same standpoint that
we now employ in studies upon the acquisition of skill in the human
being.[2]

[Footnote 2: _Ibid._, pp. 323-24.]

The human baby starts its expressive habits by emitting
with wide-open mouth an undifferentiated shriek of pain. A
little later it yells in the same way at any kind of discomfort.
It begins before the end of the first year to croon when it is
contented. As it grows older it begins to make different
sounds when it experiences different emotions. And with
remarkable rapidity its repertoire of articulatory movements
has greatly increased.

Speech that begins in the child as a mere vague vocal
expression of emotion soon begins to exhibit a marked element
of mimicry. The child begins to associate the words uttered
by his nurse or parents with the specific objects they point to.
He comes to connect "milk," "sleep," "mother" with the
experiences to which they correspond. The child thus learns
to react to certain sounds as significant of certain experiences.
Unlike Adam, he does not have to give names to animals, or
for that matter to anything else on earth. They all have
specific names in the particular language in which he happens
to be brought up. In the case of other habits, largely through
trial and error, he learns to associate given sounds expressed
by other people about him with given experiences, pleasant
or unpleasant. He learns further to imitate, so far as possible,
these sounds, as a means of more precisely communicating
his wants or securing their fulfillment.

In this connection students of language frequently have
raised the question of how man first came to associate a given
sound-sequence with a given experience. Like fire, language
was once conceived to be a divine gift. Another theory
postulated a genius who took it into his head to give the
things of earth their present inevitable names. One other
theory equally dubious held that language started in onomatopoetic
expressions like "Bow-wow," for dog. Still another
hypothesis once highly credited held that the sounds first
uttered were the immediate and appropriat