The pre-speaking period:  This is the period between the time of birth and the age of 2, and takes the child up to the time of the first spoken word.  This does not mean, of course, that no child speaks before the age of 2, for many children have made their first trials at speaking at as early an age as 15 months, and many begin to talk by the time they are a year and a half old.  At the age of two, however, not only the precocious child but the child of slower-than-average development should be able to talk in at least brief, disjointed monosyllables.

Before taking up the possibility of a child exhibiting symptoms of defective speech with the first utterance, let us familiarize ourselves with the fundamentals underlying the production of the first spoken words.

The mother, who for months, perhaps, has been listening with eager interest and fond anticipation for her child’s first word to be spoken, has little comprehension of the vast amount of education and training which the infant has absorbed in order to perfect this first small utterance.  Months have been spent in listening to others, in taking in sounds and recalling them, in impressing them upon the memory by constant repetition, until finally after a year and a half, or more, perhaps, the circuit is completed and the first word is put down as history.

Association of ideas:  It must be remembered that perfect co-ordination of speech is the result of many mental images, not of one.  In saying the word “salt,” for instance, you have a graphic mental picture of what salt looks like; a second picture of what the word sounds like; a “motor-memory” picture of the successive muscle movements necessary to the formation of the word; another picture that recalls the taste of salt, and still another that recalls the movements of the hand necessary to write the word.

These pictures all hinging upon the word “salt” were gradually acquired from the time you began to observe.  You tasted salt.  You saw it at the same time you tasted it.  There you see was an association of two ideas.  Thereafter, when you saw salt, you not only recognized it by sight, but your brain recalled the taste of salt, without the necessity of your really tasting it.  Or, on the other hand, if you had shut your eyes and someone had put salt on your tongue, the taste in that case would have recalled to your mind the graphic picture of the appearance of salt.

As you grew older and learned to speak, your vocal organs imitated the sound of the word “salt” as you heard it expressed by others and thus you learned to speak that word.  At that stage, your brain was capable of calling up three mental pictures—­an auditory picture, or a picture of the sound of the word; a graphic or visual picture, or a picture of the appearance of salt and a third, which we have called a motor-memory picture, which represents the muscular movements necessary to speak the word.  A little later on, after you had gone to school and learned to write, you added to these pictures a fourth, the movements of the hand necessary to write the word “salt.”