5 First words

After spending the first months of life vocalising, babbling, listening and observing, young children typically begin to use words in meaningful ways sometime around their first birthday (Fenson et al., 1994). Let’s start by having a look at the first words children produce across three languages. Table X shows the first words spoken by children around their first birthday, when they have between one and ten words in their vocabulary. All words have been translated in English equivalents where possible. Words underlined are common across all three languages, and words in italics are common across two languages.

As you can see, there are some similarities across languages – 6 of the top 20 words appear across all three languages with further overlaps between any two of the others – as well as clear differences. Moving beyond the particular words children say, let us look at what kinds of words they use in their first utterances displayed in Table X.

Here too there is a similar story of similarities and differences. Regardless of the language they are learning, children use their first words to describe people, familiar objects in their home and common actions. Some of these similarities may be caused, not so much because they are children learning a language, but rather that they are simply people who don’t yet know the language that everyone around them speaks. As an adult who is parachuted into a foreign country might behave, so too children’s first words are often tied to fulfilling their basic needs or commenting on what is immediately around them.

The relative ordering of common nouns, verbs, and routines does significantly vary across languages. English-speaking children produce many more words that fall into the common nouns category whereas Mandarin-speaking children produce twice as many verbs as common nouns and Cantonese-speaking children roughly equal numbers of common nouns and verbs. These differences can reflect the relative frequency of these categories in the languages children are trying to learn – some languages naturally use more verbs than others. Sometimes these differences reflect the relative frequency of the categories between different speakers – some speakers naturally use more verbs than others. Overall, the type of first words children use show some similar characteristics and some differences shaped by social, cognitive, environmental and linguistic factors.

In the following video Dr Saloni Krishnan explores how expanding on what children are saying can help scaffold their language development.

Video 3 Can the way we respond to children’s first words affect their language development?

A toddler’s brain is constantly changing as its tiny cells or neurons make new connections and get rid of old ones as they learn new things. This is what scientists call brain plasticity. So, when we repeat back a word a child has said and expand on it to create a phrase or sentence, their brain begins to build new connections between different words and what they mean. These are known as semantic links, and children form thousands of these links as they learn language. The more they build these links and hear longer phrases, the more likely they will be to begin using longer phrases themselves.