Parents love to see how our babies grow and evolve and see how they are doing more and more things. It's great when they smile, amazing when they stare at us, fabulous when they stick out their tongues and imitate us when they start grabbing things by hand.
Now, how amazing is the day they seem to say their first word, the day I am happy, looking at something and with a crazy desire to start getting noticed they tell you that "Aaaajo". You eat it, the child, not the garlic. Now when will he say it? When do they say garlic for the first time?
The first trials
Sometime between the month and the second month they begin to rehearse a bit by moving your tongue and lips, closing them and making some bubbles of saliva. They make no noise, but they begin to move the structures of the mouth as if preparing to emit some sound.
As the days or weeks go by, around three months, they are able to start making their first sounds. Those sounds they are known as twitter (There are those who call them gorgojeos, but this word, although it is used a lot, does not exist), which are the noises emitted with the throat, but without them still being articulated.
Later it begins to seem to say something and emit their first open vowels. They are tests that they do, a beginning of communication that does not have to be learned, because even deaf children do it (a fact that for many years it has made the parents of deaf children not realize that their children did not hear until later).
When they turn four months It is when many children are released and are able to put together the learned vowels, which they have already tried, with the commented twitter (vowel + twitter + vowel = A + J + O), although sometimes it is only a vowel with twitter ( "Aggg, Aggg") that parents usually also serve as "garlic."
Is it your first word?
Well, it's not going to be. You will tell me what it is for a child to learn to say garlic, if you give them a head of garlic in the hand and they throw it away, if you give them a try and they spit it out. It's not their first word because they don't know what they are saying. It is simply the union of the sounds they know how to make by achieving a word that turns out to be in our dictionary. If a Catalan child (here in Catalonia, garlic is known as "all", which is pronounced as it sounds and not "ol", which in English is" everything ") says garlic and it turns out that his parents have only spoken to him in Catalan, I don't think he learned it from television.
Yes, I know, I am the typical spoiler. I know it's cooler to say that "my son has already said his first word: garlic!", But no, he doesn't say it consciously, so all he has managed to do is say something that makes sense to us.
Well, and then when do they say their first word with meaning?
Well, when I say mom or dad thinking about mom and dad, because the first times they say we are in them, it is a ma-ma-ma-ma or pa-pa-pa-pa that says by imitation. As I suppose you want it to be a little more concrete, I will tell you that at eleven and a half months, 50% of children already say it meaningfully. At 13 months, 75% of children do it and 95% do so at the age of 16 months. That is, some children will say their first word by 9 to 11 months, and others will take a little more time.
