Stammering, Its Cause and Cure by Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
page 84 of 195 (43%)
page 84 of 195 (43%)
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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." At the sight of the mother, a child may, for instance, be heard to say the word "Mom" while at the sight of the pet dog whose name is "Dot," be heard to say "Dot" in his childish way. Here we have the first example in this child of the association of ideas. The child has heard, repeatedly, the word "Mama" used in conjunction with the appearance of the smiling face of his mother. Thus has the child acquired the habit of associating the word "Mama" with that face--and the sight of the countenance after a time recalls the sound of the associated word. Thus a visual image of the mother transmitted to the child through the medium of the eye, links up a train of thought that finally results in the child's attempt to say "Mama." |
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