First word Stage

Firts Words

At the end of the first year, children utter their first words. Some time after the age of one, the child begins to use the same string of

sounds repeatedly to mean the same thing, thereby producing her first words.
The age of the child when this occurs varies and has nothing to do with the
child’s intelligence.
The child’s first words may differ from the words of the adult language.
The following words of one child, J. P., at the age of sixteen months, illustrate the point:

[ʔaʊ] ‘not,’ ‘no,’ ‘don’t’        [sː] ‘aerosol spray’
[bʌʔ]/[mʌʔ] ‘up’                    [sʲuː] ‘shoe’
[da] ‘dog’                               [haɪ] ‘hi’
[iʔo]/[siʔo] ‘Cheerios’           [sr] ‘shirt,’ ‘sweater’
[sa] ‘sock’                              [sæː]/[əsæː] ‘what’s that?’/’hey, look!’
[aɪ]/[ʌɪ] ‘light’                       [ma] ‘mommy’
[baʊ]/[daʊ] ‘down’               [dæ] ‘daddy’

What is important is not that these words differ from the adult’s, but that they represent a fixed sound-meaning pairing. 

These one word utterances can also take the place of a whole sentence. A child may use the word dada to mean 'I see daddy'  or water to mean 'give me more water'. Children will tend to use this stage to obtain things they want or need, but sometimes tend to not be very obvious. The child will appear to give a single word which gives the most information about what they want to express. These one word utterances are usually open class words such as nouns and verbs but also commonly consist of stem words.