The emergence of words

Children's ability to interact with others and to engage in rudimentary forms of communication emerges during their first year when they participate in reciprocal interchanges with their caregivers. Children usually exploit various sorts of vocal and gestural strategies which take the form of increasingly conventionalized signals during the last quarter of the first year (see Bates et al., 1979 for review). Such signals are neither symbolic nor linguistic in any standard sense of these notions. Typical examples in the repertoires of most sighted children are instances of communicative reaching, pointing, and offering. Parallel signals from blind children appear to involve the use of ritualized hand movements associated with specific nursery routines (Urwin, 1978a, b). A significant qualitative change in children's communicative strategies occurs when they begin to acquire and use words.

The first instances of word-like vocalizations occur when children consistently use a relatively stable sound pattern in a particular situation. Such patterns differ from prelinguistic babbling in that they represent a stable sequence and they are used with a consistent communicative (or simply interactional) function, but these patterns differ from actual words in that they need not share meaning or form with any word in the target language. Hence, they seem to form a bridge between non-linguistic and linguistic vocalization. Many of the early diary studies indicate that these patterns originate in children's imitating various environmental sounds, including their own spontaneous noises (see Guillaume, 1978; Leopold, 1939–49; Stern and Stern, 1928).