ABSTRACT
The Child‘s First Response to Sounds.—Until recently, it was supposed that the child was physiologically deaf for some days after birth. This, for instance, was the view accepted by Stern in 1922 (KSp 144). But already in 1919, Watson (PB 236) had reported definite wrist-movements of a one-day-old child in response to loud noises; in 1926, Hetzer and Tudor-Hart, in an extended series of observations, found—as Stern records in the last edition of his work (KSp 160)—that a child shows some response to hand-clapping within the first three days. More recently still, in 1927, Lowenfeld, from his own observations and a review of the literature (RS 66) concludes that the child may normally be said to hear on his first day.
