Ever wonder what your child's first words will be? When are they going to arrive? And why those words are their first?
Waiting around for your child's first words can be annoying. A child's first word emerges between 12 and 18 months.
Children's first words are normally nouns. These consist of 'mamma', 'dada', 'cat' and 'dog. However according to the Telegraph 'dada' beats 'mamma' as the most common first word, which in my experience seems to be true. Children also learn the words of the objects that they are most interested in.
The little girl I babysit for is 16 months old so her speech is very limited. Her first utterance was 'dada' which was a proud moment, and 'mum' followed shortly after. Her next word, after 'dada' and 'mum' was 'shoes' which was such a delight to mum – who is now teaching her to say 'bags'.
Twins on the other hand are late developers in speaking because they tend to talk to each other in their own babble language. Although the babble does not count as their first words even though they seem to understand each other, but others do not. This is known as "late onset of speech" according to speech-language-therapy.com.
Babbling is when a child tries to mimic the sounds in their environment which is how they get their first word by mimicking your voice in order to say a particular word. After babbling they then use some kind of 'nonsense speech' which is known as 'jargon' according to "Speech and language developmental milestones".
Jargon is when a child is constantly babbling to others in order to make a conversation, this is difficult when the other person has no idea what the child is saying. However, even if you don't understand them, they understand you. A couple of weeks ago I was surprised to find a 16 month old take orders from her mum to grab a book and hand it over to me. So why can't we understand them if they can understand us?
This is because their vocal cords aren't developed properly and they can only pronounce vowels and easy nouns with a maximum of two syllables.
"Most children have a spoken vocabulary of at least 50 words by the age of 18 months." I found this list on a language development site which contained this list of words used by children by the age of 18 moths according to research found in the 1980's.
The list is:
| 1. uh-oh | 26. tick tock |
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