A child also meets frequently the situations ‘say dada,’ ‘say mama,’ ‘say good night’ and the like,[41] and is rewarded when his general babble produces something like the word spoken to him. He thus, by the law of effect, learns to respond to any ‘say’ situation by making _some_ sound and to each of many ‘say’ situations by making an appropriate sound, and to feel satisfaction at duplicating these words when heard. According to the amount of such training, the tendency to respond to words spoken to him by making some sound may become very strong, and the number of successful duplications very large. Satisfaction may be so connected with saying words that the child practices them by himself orally and even in inner speech. The second alternative relies upon the instinct of babbling, and the satisfaction of getting desirable effects from speech, either the effect which the word has by its meaning as a request (‘water,’ ‘milk,’ ‘take me outdoors’ and the like) or the effect which it has by its mere sound upon companions who notice, pet or otherwise reward a child for linguistic progress. There are many difficulties in the way of accepting the first alternative. First of all, no one can believe that _all_ of a child’s speech is acquired by direct imitation. On many occasions the process is undoubtedly one of the production of many sounds, irrespective of the model given, and the selection of the best one by parental reward. Any student who will try to get a child who is just beginning to speak, to say cat, dog and mouse and will record the sounds actually made by the child in the three cases, will find them very much alike. There will in fact be little that even _looks_ like direct imitation until the child has ‘learned’ at least forty or fifty words. The second difficulty lies in the fact that different children, in even the clearest cases of the imitation of one sound, vary from it in so many directions. A list of all the sounds made in response to one sound heard is more suggestive of random babble as modified by various habits of duplicating sounds, than of a direct potency of the model. Ten children of the same age may, in response to ‘Christmas,’ say, kiss, kissus, krismus, mus, kim, kimus, kiruss, i-us and even totally unlike vocables such as hi-yi or ya-ya. The third difficulty is that in those features of word-sounds which are hard to acquire, such as the ‘th’ sound, direct imitation is inadequate. The teacher has recourse to trial and chance success, the spoken word serving as a model to guide satisfaction and discomfort. In general no sound not included in the instinctive babble of children seems to be acquired by merely hearing and seeing it made.