In other words, the little child is not equipped psychologically to hear complicated units. I wish some one could determine how the average four-year-old hears the harmony of a chord on the piano. Is it much except confusion? In the same way, he is not equipped to leap a span between units. I wish some one would determine the four-year-old's memory span for rhymes, for instance. The involutions, the suggestiveness so attractive to adult ears, he cannot hear. Even an adult ear, untutored, can scarcely hear the intermingling rhythms and overlapping rhymes which blend like overtones of a chord in such verse as Patmore's Ode "The Toys." I feel sure the small child cannot hear complexities; he cannot leap gaps. And so he cannot understand when even simple ideas are given in complex and discontinuous form. This explains his notorious love of repetition. Repetition is the simplest of patterns, simple enough to be enjoyed as pattern. I have found that almost any simple phrase of music or words repeated slowly and with a kind of ceremonious attention, enthralls a year-old child. If the unit is simple enough to be remembered he will inevitably enjoy recognizing it as it recurs and recurs. This is the embryonic pattern sense.
This pattern enjoyment too is motor in its basis. His early repetitions of sounds are probably largely pleasure in muscle patterns. We all know that a child uses first his large muscles,--arm, leg and back,--and that he early enjoys any regular recurrent use of these muscles. So at the time when the vocal muscles tend to become his means of expression, he enjoys repeating the same sounds over and over. And soon he gets enjoyment from listening to repetitions or rhythmic language,--a vicarious motor enjoyment. Surely it is important that stories should furnish him this exercise and pleasure. Three- and four-year-olds will enjoy a positively astounding amount of repetition. In the Arabella and Araminta stories a large proportion of the sentences are given in duplicate by the simple device of having twins who do and say the same things and by telling the remarks and actions of each. The selection quoted is repeated entire four times, the variation being only in the flower picked: