A Contribution to Infantile Linguistic

Abstract

In some recent works on this subject the rule has been adopted, in making up the child's vocabulary at a certain age, to admit only such words as were actually used during the last month of the period covered, and to form the list by writing each word down when it was used.I have not thought it best to place myself under such restrictions.What we want is the list of words of which the child has command; and if we are sure that it has command of a certain word, such word should not be excluded for the mere reason that the child did not happen to use it during an arbitrarily limited space of time.We could not, for instance, expect a child to happeri to use the word "snow" between the 2d of May and the ;Id of June.I n the present case, therefore, the following plan has been pursued: When the child was just two years old, aided by its mother I examined the words, one by one, in a dictionary, and marked such words as we were sure the child not only understood, but had spontaneously used, and still could use ;1. We should expect a priori that a child's vocabulary