Baby first word timeline

First Words, Teaching Activities, and More

Written by Rebecca Buffum Taylor

In this Article

• When Will You Hear Baby's First Words?
• Can You Teach Babies to Talk?
• If You're Concerned About a Speech Delay

Before babies learn to talk in a real language -- English, say, or Spanish -- they babble and coo, playing with sound. That's baby talk, and baby talk sounds similar the world over.

But when will you hear your baby's first words? Critical milestones for a baby learning to talk happen in the first three years of life, when a baby's brain is rapidly developing. During that time, your baby's speech development depends on your "baby talk" skills as well as your baby's.

When Will You Hear Baby's First Words?

The first "baby talk" is nonverbal and happens soon after birth. Your baby grimaces, cries, and squirms to express a range of emotions and physical needs, from fear and hunger to frustration and sensory overload. Good parents learn to listen and interpret their baby's different cries.

Just when your baby will say those magical first words varies greatly from individual baby to individual baby. But if your baby misses any of the following milestones in speech development, talk to your pediatrician or family doctor about your concerns.

Baby Talk Milestones

• Baby talk at 3 months. At 3 months, your baby listens to your voice, watches your face as you talk, and turns toward other voices, sounds, and music that can be heard around the home. Many infants prefer a woman's voice over a man's. Many also prefer voices and music they heard while they were still in the womb. By the end of three months, babies begin "cooing" -- a happy, gentle, repetitive, sing-song vocalization.
• Baby talk at 6 months. At 6 months, your baby begins babbling with different sounds. For example, your baby may say "ba-ba" or "da-da." By the end of the sixth or seventh month, babies respond to their own names, recognize their native language, and use their tone of voice to tell you they're happy or upset. Some eager parents interpret a string of "da-da" babbles as their baby's first words -- "daddy!" But babbling at this age is usually still made up of random syllables without real meaning or comprehension.
• Baby talk at 9 months. After 9 months, babies can understand a few basic words like "no" and "bye-bye." They also may begin to use a wider range of consonant sounds and tones of voice.
• Baby talk at 12-18 months. Most babies say a few simple words like "mama" and "dadda" by the end of 12 months -- and now know what they're saying. They respond to -- or at least understand, if not obey -- your short, one-step requests such as, "Please put that down."
• Baby talk at 18 months. Babies at this age say several simple words and can point to people, objects, and body parts you name for them. They repeat words or sounds they hear you say, like the last word in a sentence. But they often leave off endings or beginnings of words. For example, they may say "daw" for "dog" or "noo-noo's" for "noodles."
• Baby talk at 2 years. By age 2, babies string together a few words in short phrases of two to four words, such as "Mommy bye-bye" or "me milk." They're learning that words mean more than objects like "cup" -- they also mean abstract ideas like "mine."
• Baby talk at 3 years. By the time your baby is age 3, their vocabulary expands rapidly, and "make-believe" play spurs an understanding of symbolic and abstract language like "now," feelings like "sad," and spatial concepts like "in."

Can You Teach Babies to Talk?

Babies understand what you're saying long before they can clearly speak. Many babies learning to talk use only one or two words at first, even when they understand 25 or more.

You can help your baby learn to talk if you:

• Watch. Your baby may reach both arms up to say they want to be picked up, hand you a toy to say they want to play, or push food off their plate to say they've had enough. Smile, make eye contact, and respond to encourage these early, nonverbal attempts at baby talk.
• Listen. Pay attention to your baby's cooing and babbling, and coo and babble those same sounds right back to your baby. Babies try to imitate sounds their parents are making and to vary pitch and tone to match the language heard around them. So be patient and give your baby lots of time to "talk" to you.
• Praise. Smile and applaud even the smallest or most confusing attempts at baby talk. Babies learn the power of speech by the reactions of adults around them.
• Imitate. Babies love to hear their parents' voices. And when parents talk to them it helps speech develop. The more you talk their "baby talk" with them, using short, simple but correct words, such as "dog" when your baby says "daw," the more babies will keep trying to talk.
• Elaborate. If your baby points to the table and makes noise, don't just give them more noodles. Instead, point to the noodles and say, "Do you want some more noodles? These noodles taste good with cheese, don't they?"
• Narrate. Talk about what you're doing as you wash, dress, feed, and change your baby -- "Let's put on these blue socks now" or "I'm cutting up your chicken for you" -- so your baby connects your speech to these objects and experiences.
• Hang in there. Even when you don't understand what your baby is saying, keep trying. Gently repeat back what you think is being said, and ask if that's right. Keep offering your loving attention so your baby feels rewarded for trying to talk.
• Let your child lead. During playtime, follow your child's attention and interests to show that communication is a two-way game of talking and listening, leading, and following.
• Play. Encourage children to play, pretend, and imagine out loud to develop verbal skills as they become toddlers.
• Read aloud. Lifelong readers come from young children who have plenty of fun, relaxing experiences of being read to out loud.

If You're Concerned About a Speech Delay

Watch for any sign of a major speech delay in your baby, and talk with your doctor if you sense there's a problem. A speech delay can happen for a number of reasons, but the earlier a speech problem in babies is diagnosed, the more time you'll have to correct it and help your child reach their full potential before school age. After consulting with your pediatrician, here are things to do to help with delayed speech:

• Have a hearing test done. As many as three out of 1,000 newborns have hearing loss, which can cause delayed speech development. Most states require a hearing screening in the hospital right after birth. Take your baby in for a full hearing exam by age 3 months if they don't pass the initial hearing screening.
• See a speech-language pathologist. A SLP can diagnose and treat specific speech, language, or voice disorders that delay speech. Treatment may include giving parents tips and games to improve speech problems in babies and improve a child's language skills.
• Consider developmental screening. Up to 17% of children in the U.S. have a developmental or behavioral disability such as autism spectrum disorder or cognitive disability. Ask your baby's doctor about screening for these developmental problems, which can cause speech delays.

What's the first step for babies learning to talk? Encourage your baby's first words with your frequent cooing, babbling, talking, and singing. Keep responding positively and showing you care. When it comes to baby talk, that's the best building block.

When do babies say their first word?

© 2018 – 2022 Gwen Dewar, Ph.D., all rights reserved

Babies make lots of communicative noises, but coos, gurgles, and cries aren’t true speech. When do babies say their first words? Most babies can say at least one or two words by the end of their first year, but the timing may vary considerably from individual to individual.

For instance, experiments indicate that babies understand certain words — like the names of everyday objects — as early as 6 months. And between 5 and 10 months, most babies have begun babbling in ways that are very speech-like.

Could some of these infants be using speech sounds to communicate — putting together simple syllables (like “ba-ba”) to express a concrete meaning (like “bottle”)? Maybe. According to survey of more than 1500 families in the United States, more than 50% of parents believe their babies are speaking their first words by 10 months postpartum (Schneider et al 2015).

On the flip side, that same survey found that about 25% of babies still hadn’t spoken by their first birthdays. Are these babies at risk for problems? Not necessarily. But if your baby is on the slow side, it’s a good idea to make sure you baby is getting plenty of opportunities to practice language, and to talk with your pediatrician.

Here are the details about when babies start talking — and what to look for if you’re concerned about developmental delays.

From birth, babies make a variety of vocalizations. But it isn’t until months later that babies begin repeating sounds that we recognize as true speech syllables — syllables that include both a consonant and a vowel, like “ma-ma-ma” or “ba-ba-ba” (Oller et al 2001; Oller et al 1998).

When babies blend the consonants and vowels together quickly, the way adult speakers do, it’s called “canonical babbling” (Oller et al 1999). The age of onset varies from individual to individual, and different studies have reported somewhat different trends (Molemans et al 2012). In some studies, a few babies started canonical babbling before 5 months, and more than half had begun shortly after 7 months (van der Stelt and Koopmans-can Beinum 1986; Fagan 2009). In another study, canonical babbling wasn’t initiated by most infants until after 8 months (Nathani et al 2006).

Overall, researchers expect most normally-developing babies to begin canonical babbling sometime between 5-6 months and 10 months (Lang et al 2019; Morgan and Wren 2019). But regardless of when it starts, canonical babbling is a crucial step forward: Babies are practicing the pronunciation of syllables that will become the building blocks of true words.

Where do we draw the line between babbling and a baby’s first, real word?

It’s tricky. When children are learning to talk, their pronunciation is far from perfect. They do their best to approximate the sounds they hear, and the results might sound like babbling, even though they intend their sounds to function as real words. For example, what if your baby consistently says “ba-ba” when she’s given a bottle? Maybe she is deliberately and intentionally trying to say “bottle.” If so, that’s a word — albeit an imperfectly pronounced one.

So the question, “when do babies say their first words?” depends not only on the sounds they make, but on whether or not babies have figured out what the sounds are supposed to mean. How early do babies crack the code?

Researchers have designed a clever way to test word comprehension in babies.

First, babies sit on their mothers’ laps while facing an electronic screen. Then a series of images are presented to the babies — images of everyday items. The mothers are blindfolded, so they can’t know what, exactly, their babies can see. But the mothers wear earphones so they can receive instructions from experimenters about what to tell their babies.

With each trial, multiple items appear simultaneously at different locations on the screen.  And the mothers are told to say something — to repeat back a phrase or question that singles out one object by name.

For instance, if the screen displays two items — a mouth on the left and an apple on the right — the mother might be told to say, “Do you see the mouth?”

How do babies react?

Researchers testing English-speaking families have consistently found that babies as young as 6 months tend to look more at the items their mothers speak about. They appear to understand many words, including the names of their parents (e.g., “Mama” and “Daddy”), as well words that refer body parts and food (Tinkoff and Jusczyk 1999; Tinkoff and Jusczyk 2012; Bergelson and Swingley 2012; Bergelson and Swingley 2015; Bergelson and Aslin 2017; Bergelson and Swingley 2018).

Results may vary by context. When babies listen to other, unfamiliar voices, they don’t always show the same evidence of word comprehension (Steil et al 2021). It’s also possible that some languages are harder than others for babies decipher. In one experiment, babies learning Norwegian didn’t show preferential looking until they were 8-9 months old, possibly because Norwegian is a more phonologically complex language than English (Kartushina and Mayor 2019).

Moreover, as you might expect, it depends a lot on which words you test. Babies are more likely to have learned the meaning of words that their parents have used in conversation with them every day. And some situations may be especially conducive to learning.

For instance, during meal times, caregivers typically interact with their babies face to face, and they may repeat certain key words (like the names of utensils and food items) at just the right moment — when babies are looking at the objects being named (Clerkin and Smith 2019). This makes it easier for babies to figure out what parents are trying to communicate.

So if your baby seems to understand what the word “bottle” means, and says something like “ba-ba” to request his bottle, it’s not unreasonable to think he’s making use of a word. Reports of early word use aren’t common, but they exist. For instance, in a study tracking 46 babies over time, 6 individuals were reported by their English-speaking parents to be producing a word by the age of 7 months (Moore et al 2019).

And even if your baby doesn’t turn out to be an early talker? It’s worthwhile to be open to the idea that you’re baby is ready to produce language. That’s because language skills grow when adults engage babies in conversation. (Frank et al 2021; Ferjan Ramírez et al 2020; Ferjan Ramírez et al 2019; Newman et al 2016; Shneidman and Goldin-Meadow 2012). If we take the stance that our babies might be capable of using words earlier in life, it will encourage us to provide our babies with the rich, interactive language they need to develop larger vocabularies.

Researchers emphasize that it’s normal for babies to vary quite a bit in the timing of their speech milestones. As noted above, a recent survey suggests that approximately 25% of babies haven’t spoken their first words by the age of 12 months. But there are guidelines for identifying children that seem to be developing more slowly than normal.

In typically-developing children, canonical babbling emerges by 10 months. Babies who don’t show signs of canonical babbling by the end of this period may be at risk for future language problems (Lang et al 2019; Lomander et al 2017). So if you aren’t hearing those syllables by 9 months, this is something you’ll want to monitor. Talk to your pediatrician about your concerns, and take advantage of opportunities to help your baby learn. This includes engaging in your baby in conversation (as mentioned above). It also includes encouraging your baby’s efforts to babble by imitating the speech-like sounds your baby makes (Goldstein and Schwade 2008).

Language delays are sometimes an early sign that a child will develop autism spectrum disorder (ASD), so you’ll want to watch out for other potential signs. Newborn babies who later develop autism often show a normal interest in making eye contact with their caregivers. But, between 2 and 6 months postpartum, these babies begin to pay less attention to eyes (Jones and Klin 2014; Schultz et al 2018), and they show less interest in social interactions (Shen and Piven 2017).

Throughout the world, infants are typically speaking their first words by 11-13 months, and research suggests that most babies show major improvements in their ability to understand speech by 14 months (Bergelson and Swingley 2012).  So if your baby is approaching 14 months and still hasn’t spoken any words, it’s a good idea to consult with your pediatrician for advice.

When a child’s language development lags behind, that doesn’t always mean that something is wrong. But if there is an underlying problem, it’s best to identify it early in development. Modern speech therapists have developed interventions for children with speech delays (Law et al 2003), and the earlier children begin, the sooner children can make progress.

Ways to support language development

Babies need our help learning language. Like adults who learn to speak a foreign language, babies benefit from being included in conversation. They also benefit when we pay attention to their curiosity, and use evocative gestures as we speak to them. Read more about these tactics, and other evidence-based ways to help your baby learn in my article, “How to support language development in babies”.

More information

For more in-depth information about the power of one-on-one communication in teaching children to understand and speak words, see this article.

References: When do babies say their first words?

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Bergelson E and Swingley D. 2015. Early Word Comprehension in Infants: Replication and Extension. Lang Learn Dev. 11(4):369-380.

Bergelson E and Swingley D. 2012. At 6-9 months, human infants know the meanings of many common nouns. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 109(9):3253-8

Bergelson E and Aslin RN. 2017. Nature and origins of the lexicon in 6-mo-olds. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 114(49):12916-12921.

Bradshaw J, McCracken C, Pileggi M, Brane N, Delehanty A, Day T, Federico A, Klaiman C, Saulnier C, Klin A, Wetherby A. 2021. Early social communication development in infants with autism spectrum disorder. Child Dev. 92(6):2224-2234.

Clerkin EM and Smith LB. 2019. The everyday statistics of objects and their names: How word learning gets its start. Cogsci. 2019:240-246.

Fagan MK. 2009. Mean Length of Utterance before words and grammar: longitudinal trends and developmental implications of infant vocalizations. J Child Lang. 36(3):495-527.

Ferjan Ramírez N, Lytle SR, Kuhl PK. 2020. Parent coaching increases conversational turns and advances infant language development. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 117(7):3484-3491.

Ferjan Ramírez N, Lytle SR, Fish M, Kuhl PK. 2019. Parent coaching at 6 and 10 months improves language outcomes at 14 months: A randomized controlled trial. Dev Sci. 22(3):e12762.

Frank M C, Braginsky M, Yurovsky D, and Marchman VA. 2021. Variability and Consistency in Early Language Learning: The Wordbank Project. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Jones W and Klin A. 2014. Attention to eyes is present but in decline in 2-6-month-old infants later diagnosed with autism. Nature. 504(7480):427–431.

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van der Stelt J. and Koopmans-van Beinum F. 1986. The onset of babbling related to grossmotor development. In B. Lindblom & R. Zetterstro¨m (eds), Precursors of early speech,163–73. New York: Stockton Press.

Content of “When do babies say their first words” last modified 5/31/2022. Portions of text are derived from an earlier version of this article by the same author.

image of siblings by istock / Golfcuk

Image of mouth and apple by Parenting Science, and patterned after experimental slides used in Bergelson and Swingely 2012.

Early Childhood Speech Development Calendar

Early childhood is considered a very important period in a child's life.

This is the time of the most rapid and rapid changes in the mental and physical development of the baby, the child takes the first steps, learns to speak, begins to use gestures and other means of communication.

3 weeks - 1 month - there is a cry indicating emotional discomfort, pain or hunger. With physical stress, the child groans, making the sounds "a", "e". nine0003

2 - 3 months : the baby has a cooing, he utters simple sounds - " a", "y", "s ", sometimes in combination with " g ". This is an important stage in the development of speech in young children.

4 - 6 months - makes high melodious sounds, sounds of exclamation, reacts with joyful sounds to the faces of loved ones.

6 - 9 months - babbling, he repeats the same syllables (“ma-ma-ma”, “ba-ba-ba”, “dya-dya-dya”, “gu-gu-gu”).

9 - 11 months - the baby begins to imitate the sounds of adult speech.

11 - 14 months - the first meaningful words "mom", "dad", "woman", "uncle" appear, from 8 to 14 words. Correlates a word with an object

By the age of 2 years there are 100-200 words in the baby's vocabulary. He is already building a sentence of 2-3 words.

By the age of 3 the volume of the dictionary increases to 1000 words by enriching the child's life experience. Simple prepositions appear: in, on, under, for, with, at. The child remembers poems, children's songs. nine0003

By the end of 3 years , most children are able to construct sentences grammatically correctly, conduct dialogues, tell what they have seen and heard.

Important to know:

Do not listen to advice from other parents whose children began to say after 3 years that the child will speak on his own. He will speak, the only question is what kind of speech it will be, its quality.

How to identify the signs of a speech disorder in a child? nine0016