to light and sound; convulsions; early or late closing of soft spot; early or late teething; early or late muscle development or control; early or late walking or talking; sensitive in skin or mucus; thumb sucking; head rocking; fitful appetite; aversion to certain kinds of common food; nightmares; night terrors; muscular twitchings; tics; bed wetting; tremors of hands when extended; negativism; shut-in-isms; phobias; extreme imaginativeness; pathological lying; hyper-emotionalism; fatiguability; extreme timidity; undue aggressiveness; cyclic vomiting; underweight; having too long bones; sagging stomach. For people affected by such ailments as any of these, with the attendant mental and speech defects, much care must be applied. It would be a rare college or school indeed that did not have a number of such people. Yet in the ordinary college class we expect to see a minimum of these, for most classes are selected groups; the greater part of the weakest defectives have fallen by the wayside. Yet even a class of college sophomores or even seniors must contain a number of people who in some physical particular are not normal, thus making them not normal in mental capacity and in speech development. As a consequence such a class can be assumed to include many people who in addition to having poor speech models in their youth, and little attention ever paid to their speech habits, suffer from physical bars to perfect and effective speech. REEDUCATION Speech Training as Reëducation.-Teaching such students how to speak becomes in reality a task in teaching them how to manage their bodies, how to behave like rational beings, how to use their minds, how to think straight, to keep their heads, to appear in their true characters before others, to open up their minds so that what they give forth in speech is a true index of what they think and feel. Add to these the students who have had grueling emotional experiences during the reconstruction years of adolescence, and we find that the ordinary class in speech calls for training in mental hygiene. It is precisely this cure for mental indisposition that the course in speech training can give to the young man and young woman who cannot easily, frankly, clearly, and with good effect speak out whatsoever is thought or felt. The class in speech training comes, then, nearest of any in the whole curriculum to being a class in mental health, mental growth, mental salvation. Speech training is training in the art of keeping mentally fit. SUMMARY Speech develops by random activities made from the breathing and vocal apparatus; the sounds made by the voice mechanism come to have meaning for social communication through conventionalized forms, handed down from elders to children through imitation, conscious or subconscious. Young children tend to speak easily and frankly in the presence of their familiars, and copy the degree of speech excellence with which they grow up. Later when they come in contact with the world outside their homes they adopt new forms, frequently to their detriment. When they arrive at adolescence, being subjected to the irritations of a changing life and a newly growing body, they are filled with emotional complexes which are accentuated by their newly acquired consciousness of sex relations and social responsibilities. This emotionality and lack of stability. invariably affects speech habits and complicates the learning process, leading them usually farther away from the easy, simple speech habits of their early childhood. With this condition further aggravated by bodily and neurotic defects, whether shortcomings or excesses, the speech mechanism is thrown farther out of gear and is the harder to bring back to a state of ease and frankness. The business of the class in speech, then, where there are people of various kinds gathered together, is to employ all the methods available for reducing their complexes-overcoming their defects, furnishing them with proper models, training them in thinking, and offering them drill and criticism of their vocal methods, thus by all these devices furnishing an approach to acceptable standards of speaking that is comfortable, direct, and effective. ASSIGNMENTS 1. Prepare to give a two-minute talk before the class on the following topics: (a) A Statement of the Origin of Speech. (b) "Speech Is Always Learned." (c) How a Child Adds New Words and Tones. (d) The Place of Imitation in Learning to Speak. (e) Good Models of Speaking I Have Heard. (f) Mental Condition and the Mechanism of Speech. (i) "Man Thinks Because He Speaks." (j) Speech Learning for Babies, Children, Adolescents, Adults. 2. Write out for your own benefit a statement of the conditions under which you learned to speak, as best you know them. Make a frank list of the detrimental influences that affected your speech in the learning. 3. Describe the efforts of a child you know in learning to speak; show how imitation entered into its learning how; trial and error; effects of success; its attempts to master words and tones that it heard others using. APPENDIX B THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE IN SPEAKING AND WRITING 1 IN TEXTBOOKS the subjects of speaking and writing are commonly treated as though they were about the same thing; not quite, but almost. Especially where they obviously overlap, in the matter of thought content and rhetorical structure, they are left undifferentiated. Little has ever been written of their differences; much has been implied of their likenesses, more than the facts warrant. The reason for this is rather apparent-textbooks are written, not spoken. They are compiled by writers, reflecting the attitudes of writers, most of whom have had no special training in speaking and who are unfamiliar with the problems of the speaker. Many of these writing men would probably grade pretty low on the public platform or in animated conversation. Some even count it a glory that they shun the madding crowd and the press of public places. So it is not to be wondered that they confound issues as to speaking and writing; to them such issues do not exist. So if they make the very common mistake of fixing on theories that defend their own limitations and shortcomings as who does not?— their confusion in theory merely reflects their confusion in practice. But changing times are bringing changing ideals. We know now that speaking and writing are not the same. We recognize differences, definite, significant, even crucial. These differences it will pay to look into. 1 Adapted from an article in the Quarterly Journal of Speech Education; Vol. VIII, No. 3, June, 1922; pp. 271-285. WRITING AND SPEAKING COMPARED A. Writing includes three clear-cut processes: 1. Thought: analyzable into perceptions, ideas, images, concepts, facts, knowledge, belief, judgment, imagination, fancy, attitudes, purposes, intentions. 2. Language: the use of words and sentences, grammar, syntax, composition, rhetoric. 3. Typography: either handwriting or the printed page. B. Speaking is composed of four processes: 1. Thought: as in writing. 2. Language: as in writing plus phonology, articulation, pronunciation. 3. Voice: articulation and pronunciation; quality, force, time, pitch, expression, interpretation. 4. Action: bodily set, posture, manner, mood, emotional tone, movement, gesture. Clearly, the two processes overlap. Both exist to carry thought by means of language; they differ, however, and most radically, in the medium of conveyance. DIFFERENCES Yet is this difference in the mode of physical transmission, obvious as it is and immensely significant, all the difference there is? Clearly not. Thought for writing is conceived in a spirit quite different from thought for speaking. Language for writing is not by far the language for speaking. If this be true, then, from thought on down to the bodily means of expression, the two subjects differ in all particulars. Print as against the voice-body machinery is a difference most obvious in nature, but how great in degree? The answer is, they differ by a gap so wide that not to appreciate the full extent of it is to risk erring egregiously. A word done in black marks on the printed page must mean one thing only; if it means more, the page either falsifies or beclouds. Also it must mean this one thing yesterday, today, and for a long time. When expressed by the voice in speaking, however, it may mean any single thing the speaker has |