Final answer:
A child must first acquire gesture usage, which plays a crucial role in predicting language development. This development is heavily influenced by newborns' cognitive abilities to recognize voices and distinguish between languages, leading up to the production of their first word around 12 months of age. Language acquisition is biologically predisposed and occurs most efficiently during early childhood.
Step-by-step explanation:
Before producing words, a child first must acquire a range of cognitive and social abilities, including gesture usage, which has been shown to predict subsequent language development.
As babies engage in their environment, they go through various stages that include recognizing their mother's voice, differentiating between languages, cooing, and babbling. This process begins prenatally and intensifies between the ages of nine months and three years.
These stages culminate with the notable milestone at around 12 months of age when babies typically say their first word, marking the onset of spoken language production.
Children are biologically wired to learn language and tend to do so rapidly and without formal instruction, indicating a biological predisposition for language acquisition.
Critical to the process is exposure to language in their environment. Many scholars have proposed that there's a critical period for language acquisition, suggesting that proficiency at learning language is maximal early in life.