_, and her request was
again granted. Evidently encouraged by her success, the child from that
time on used _appn_ for "eat, I want to eat," as a sign of her desire to
eat in general, because those about her "accepted this signification and
took the word stamped by her upon this concept for current coin, else it
would very likely have been lost." This also confirms my statement (p.
85) that a child easily learns to speak with logical correctness with
wrong words. He also speaks like the deaf-mute with logical correctness
with quite a different arrangement of words from that of his speech of a
later period. Thus the child just mentioned, in whom "the inclination to
form sentences was manifest from the twenty-second month," said, "hat
die Olga getrinkt," when she had drunk!

But every child learns at first not only the language of those in whose
immediate daily companionship he grows up, but also at first the
peculiarities of these persons. He imitates the accent, intonation,
dialect, as well as the word, so that a Thuringian child may be surely
distinguished from a Mecklenburg child even in the second and third
year, and, at the same time, we may recognize the peculiarities of the
speech of its mother or nurse, with whom it has most intercourse. This
phenomenon, the persistence of dialects and of peculiarities of speech
in single families, gives the impression, on a superficial observation,
of being something inherited; whereas, in fact, nothing is inherited
beyond the voice through inheritance of the organic peculiarities of the
mechanism of phonation. For everything else completely disappears when a
child learns to speak from his birth in a foreign community.

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.
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 t