answers: approximately 12 months old
context: to speak and thus have no production vocabulary. So clearly, comprehension vocabulary develops before production vocabulary. Even though children do not produce their first words until they are approximately 12 months old, the ability to produce speech sounds starts to develop at a much younger age. Stark (1980) distinguishes five stages of early speech development: These earliest vocalizations include crying and vegetative sounds such as breathing, sucking or sneezing. For these vegetative sounds, infants’ vocal cords vibrate and air passes through their vocal apparatus, thus familiarizing infants with processes involved in later speech production. Infants produce cooing sounds when they </s> the mouth is full". He proposed that later in the infant's development, "this phonatory reaction to nursing is reproduced as an anticipatory signal at the mere sight of food and finally as a manifestation of a desire to eat, or more generally, as an expression of discontent and impatient longing for missing food or absent nurser, and any ungranted wish." So, the action of opening and shutting the mouth, combined with the production of a nasal sound when the lips are closed, yielded the sound sequence "Mama", which may therefore count as the very first word. Peter MacNeilage sympathetically discusses </s> order to create a meaningful sound. Other important oral structures involved in articulation, such as the tongue, lips and teeth remain in a stable resting position during babbling. Sometimes during the babbling period, the motions can be made without any vocalization at all. Signing infants produce manual babbling through similar rhythmic alternations, but they perform with their hands instead of their mouths. As a baby goes beyond the reduplicated sequences of babbling, they exhibit equal sized mouth or hand openings on the right and left sides. Typically by 6 months of age, all normally developing children will babble. However, infants
question: when is an infant 's first word typically spoken