Studies of childhood / by James Sully.

  • James Sully
Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Studies of childhood / by James Sully. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    151/544 page 139
    the powerful influences which go to make him adopt as signs the articulate sounds employed by others, shows a germ of unprompted and original sign-making. The earliest of such unlearnt signs are simple gesture-move¬ ments, such as stretching out the arms when the child desires to be taken by the nurse.1 Nobody has suggested that these are learnt by imitation. The same is true of other familiar gesture-movements, which appear towards the end of the first year or later, as pulling your dress just as a dog does, when the child wants you to go with him, touching the chair when he wants you to sit down, or (as Darwin’s child did when just over a year) taking a bit of paper and pointing to the fire by way of signifying his wish to see the paper burnt. The gesture of pointing, though no doubt commonly aided by example, is probably capable of being reached instinctively as an outgrowth from the grasping movement. These gesture-signs, I find, play a larger part in the case of children who are backward in talking, and so are nearer the condition of the deaf-mute. Thus a la !y in sending me notes on her three children remarks that the one who was particularly backward in his speech made a free use of gesture-signs. When sixteen months old he had certain general signs of this sort, using a sniff as a sign? of flower, and a mimic kiss as a sign of living things, i.e. all sorts of animals.2 Just as movements may thus be used instinctively, that is, without aid from others’ example, both as expressing simple feelings and desires, and also, as in the case just mentioned, as indicating ideas, so spontaneously formed 1 The nature of gesture, its relation to language proper, and its prevalence in infancy, among imbecile children, deaf-mutes, etc., are discussed by Romanes, Mental Evolution in Man, chap. vi. 2 A charming example of pantomimic gesture on the part of a little girl in describing to her father her first bath in the sea is given- by Romanes, op., cit., p. 220.
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