What factors contribute to the production of an infants first words?

Learning the first words, seemingly effortless, is a complex process and requires childrens extraordinary comprehensive skills and sensitivity to the external cues embedded in a social context. Although children vary in their skills of language acquisition, they display impressive abilities to make sense of their external world. Comprehension of words precedes production in a sense that children are able to identify the meaning of the words far early than speech development. Therefore production of first words is a result of intensive period of decoding the language.

My essay will discuss the factors enabling the production of an infants first words. Firstly it will look at language comprehension process shortly discussing prenatal speech learning. Followed by discussion of childrens abilities to segment the words from the speech stream using prosodic properties of th…(short extract)