child can utter its first attempts at speech. By ear-training I mean
the differentiation of sounds--articulate, inarticulate, and musical--
fixing the child's attention and causing it to _imitate_. As every
sound requires a particular movement of the vocal apparatus, the child
will soon be able to adapt its apparatus unconsciously and to
distinguish accurately. And if it does not so learn before the age of
five or six, it probably will never do so. By the age of two--or less--
the child should be able to _imitate_ exactly any speech-sound.
Our youngsters can do so; and, consequently, the fact that they had a
nurse with a Sussex accent ceased to matter, because they learned to
distinguish her talk from correct English. So in the case of a foreign
nurse; the result of a foreigner's influence would be good in this way,
that it would train a child to a _new series of speech-sounds_,
thus enlarging its ear capacity. Nor need it necessarily adopt these
speech-sounds as those which it should use; it merely knows them; and
if the foreigner have a good accent, and speaks her own tongue well,
the child's ear is trained for life, _irrespective of expression_.
Experience shows that a child can keep separate in its mind two or
three languages--at first the speech-sounds, later the expression.
_Modes of expression_ need not begin till after five, or later.
With regard to music, every child should begin to undergo a simple
course of ear-training on the sol-fa system as elaborated and taught by
McNaught, because the faculty of so learning is lost--atrophied--by the
age of twelve or fourteen. But, beginning early--as early as possible--
every child, 'musical' or not, can be trained, just as every child,
'artistic' or not, may be taught to draw accurately up to a certain
point."]

There can be little or no dispute that the English language in its
completeness presents a range too ample and appliances too subtle for