Gestures are important as means by which adults, more instinctively than voluntarily, help the child to understand the words they use. These are generally indicative gestures towards the objects; less frequently, ordinarily only in the case of words meaning seine activity such as strike, cut, walk, sleep, etc., they take the form of depicting gestures. The child has a natural understanding for these gestures, but not for words. Even the onomatopoetic words of child-speech (such as bow-bow for dog, etc.) never become intelligible to him until the objects have been frequently pointed out. The child is not the creator of these words, but it is rather the adult who seeks instinctively to accommodate himself in this respect also to the stage of the child's consciousness.
All this goes to show that the child's learning to speak is the result of a series of associations and apperceptions in whose formation both the child and those about to take part. Adults voluntarily designate particular ideas with certain words taken from the expressive sounds made by the child, or with onomatopoetic words made arbitrarily after the pattern of the first class. The child apperceives this combination of word and idea after it has been made intelligible to him with gestures, and associates it with his own imitative articulative movements. Following the pattern of these first apperceptions and associations the child their forms others, by imitating of his own accord more and more the words and [p. 293] verbal combinations that he accidentally hears adults using, and by making the appropriate associations with their meanings. The whole process is thus the result of a psychical interaction between the child and those about him. The sounds are at first produced by the child alone, those about him take up these sounds and make use of them for purposes of speech.
9. The final development that comes from all the simpler processes thus far discussed, is that of the complex function of apperception, that is the relating and comparing activities, and the activities of imagination and understanding made up of these (§ 17).
Apperceptive combination in its first form is exclusively the activity of imagination, that is the combination, analysis, and relating of concrete sensible ideas. Thus, individual development corroborates what has been said in general about the genetic relation of these functions (p. 266). On the basis of the continually increasing association of immediate impressions with earlier ideas, there arises in the child, as soon as his active attention is aroused, a tendency to form such combinations voluntarily.
The number of memory-elements freely combining with the impression and added to it, furnish us with a measure for the fertility of the individual child's imagination. As soon as this combining activity of imagination has once begun to operate, it shows itself with an impulsive force that the child is unable to resist, for there is not as yet, as ill the case of adults, any activity of the understanding to prescribe definite intellectual ends regulating and inhibiting the free sweep of the ideas of imagination.