The need to establish what is language-specific can be illustrated by results from the development of the Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks ( Haman et al., 2015), an assessment tool developed to identify language impairment in multilingual preschoolers. Regarding practical matters, any assessment tool that aims for comparability across languages must take cross-linguistic differences into account ( Peña, 2007). Disentangling these factors and their influence on children's lexicons is interesting for both practical and theoretical reasons. The phonology of children's first words can be influenced by the ambient language on the one hand and by children's cognitive and motoric abilities, such as memory capacity, vision, proprioceptive feedback from the articulators and motoric dispositions and control on the other ( Mulford, 1988 de Boysson-Bardies and Vihman, 1991 MacNeilage and Davis, 2000 McCune and Vihman, 2001 Majorano et al., 2014). The CDS was more similar to children's speech than ADS concerning the two phonological aspects dealt with here, which suggests that parents accommodate to children in phonologically detailed ways. Comparisons of the Norwegian child data with samples of adult directed speech (ADS) and child-directed speech (CDS) revealed more word-initial bilabials and shorter words among children than among adults. We found that Norwegian-speaking children follow the children speaking these other languages in having an affinity for word initial bilabials, but that the proportions of mono-, di-, and polysyllables vary depending on the language acquired. Based on data from parental reports (CDI), we compared the 50 first words in Norwegian to those in Danish, Swedish, English, and Italian, analyzing two phonological aspects: word initial bilabials and word length in syllables. Comparing the Norwegian child data with data from children speaking five different languages, we examine how the child's emergent lexicon is on the one hand shaped by the input of the ambient language, but on the other hand limited by more common phonological characteristics of child speech. In this paper, we focus on the phonological characteristics of children's first words, primarily looking at word-initial labials and word length in Norwegian children's first words, as well as at how parents accommodate to child patterns in their speech. The mental lexicon is dynamic and changes throughout the lifespan, but how does it begin? Previous research has established that children's first words depend on their communicative needs, but also on their phonetic repertoire and phonological preferences. 3Frambu Resource Centre for Rare Disorders, Siggerud, Norway.2MultiLing, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway.1OsloMet – Oslo Metropolitan University, Oslo, Norway.Nina Gram Garmann 1,2 *, Pernille Hansen 2 *, Hanne Gram Simonsen 2 and Kristian Emil Kristoffersen 3
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