Example Criteria for Identifying Children's First Words

(Vihman and McCune (1994))

  1. Determinative context: Does at least one use occur in a context which strongly suggests that word and no other?
  2. Maternal identification: Does the mother identify at least one instance of the form as a token of the hypothesized word?
  3. Multiple use: Does the child use the word more than once?
  4. Multiple episodes: Is there more than one episode of use?
  5. Complex match: Does the child form match more than two segments of the adult form?
  6. Exact match: Is there at least one instance that even an untrained ear would recognize as an instance of the word?
  7. Prosodic match: Is there a prosodic match with the adult target? Is there a characteristic tune which fits the word-meaning and which occurs across all suspected tokens?
  8. Imitated tokens: Is at least one instance imitated?
  9. Invariant: Do all instances of the word exhibit the same phonological shape?
  10. No inappropriate uses: Do all uses occur in contexts which plausibly suggest the same word?