. The
experiment showed that the elements of the oriole's song were provided
by nature, while the combination of these elements was acquired by
imitation.

Probably this last is about the result one would get in the analogous
case of human speech, if a similar experiment should be tried on
children. Without an experiment, we have certain facts that point to a
conclusion. The child uses his vocal organs from birth on; and before
he reaches the age when he imitates the speech of others, he produces
various vowels and consonants, and even puts them together into simple
compounds, as "da-da" and "goo-goo." So far, deaf children do about
the same as others, affording additional evidence that so much of
speech is native. To get real speech, however, further combinations of
the speech movements must be made, and the combinations (words) must
have meaning attached to them. These higher achievements are evidently
the result of learning, since the child uses the words that it hears
spoken, and attaches the same meanings to them as people do about it.
The child comes to speak the language of those about it, without
regard to the speech of its ancestors. His "native language" is
therefore acquired, though the elements of vocal utterance are truly
native, and apparently are alike all over the world without regard to
the various languages spoken.

{95}

Is Walking Native or Acquired?

As another example of this same general problem of distinguishing
native from acquired reactions, and of the kind of evidence that
throws light on the problem in the absence of direct experiment, let
us consider the child's walking. Does the child learn to walk, or does
it simply _come_ to walk when its natural development has gone far
enough? We think the child learns to walk because it begins very
imperfectly and usually takes several weeks before it can be described
as really walking of itself. We even think we teach it to walk, though
when we examine our teaching we soon convince ourselves that we do not
know _how_ we walk, and that what we are doing with the baby is to
stimulate and encourage him to walk, protect him from hurting himself,
etc., rather than teaching him as we later teach the child to write.
An experiment to settle the matter might be conducted along the lines
of Spalding's experiment on the young birds. We might prevent the baby
from making any attempt to walk till it had fully reached the normal
age for walking, and then turn