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Guide to the Clinical Examination and Treatment of Sick Children
Guide to the Clinical Examination and Treatment of Sick Children Author:John Thomson General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1898 Original Publisher: W.F. Clay Subjects: Pediatrics Children Medical / Pediatrics Social Science / Children's Studies Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the Gene... more »ral Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: SPEECH i Development of Speech. -- A baby's first cries, like his first movements, are instinctive, and have no intentional meaning. Soon, however, he finds that his cry results in his being fed or otherwise attended to, and so he learns to cry when he wants anything. Later he gets to know that certain words or syllables mean certain things, and that by using them he gets what he wants sooner than by indiscriminate crying. By the time he is twelve months old, he will know the meaning of a good many words, and there will be one or two articulate sounds which he habitually uses with a definite meaning. During the second year his knowledge of words increases fast, and he begins to use short phrases before the end of it. The date at which different children begin to talk varies, however, greatly, and often it is impossible to tell why it does so. During the time that they are learning to speak, normal children almost always make use of some words of their own invention, but as their powers of talking develop, these baby-words are forgotten. Similar words are often invented by imbeciles, but in them they continue to be used during life. Backwardness in learning to speak is a thing which naturally causes anxiety to parents. It may be explained in a number of ways : (i). It is often attributed to tongue-tie. This is a mistake, for while the condition may interfere slightly with sucking, and possibly, as the child gets older, with the pronunciation of certain letters, it never delays spe...« less