Children utter their first recognizable word around age one. In the first few months, they tend to produce words one at a time, often with considerable effort, and with pauses in between. Early word productions may be hard to recognize because children take time to master adult pronunciation, even though they have as their targets the conventional adult forms they hear in input. In addition, the meanings they express do not always fully match the adult ones. As a result, the distinctions made by children may differ from adult usage. For example, a child who knows 3 animal terms will not use them in the same way as an older child with 25 terms, or an adult with 150 or more.

At first, children add new words for production rather slowly. Later, their repertoire grows more rapidly. From about age two, they add new words on a daily basis. They also go beyond the word itself to analyze word-internal structure and identify meanings carried by each component element. This can be seen in their analyses of familiar words, and in their spontaneous construction of new words to carry meanings not available in the everyday vocabulary they already know.

In this chapter, I sketch the course children follow in the early stages of building a vocabulary, and lay out some issues raised by early language production. I begin by taking up the rate of acquisition – the number of words added each week during the first months of language production.