Baby Language Development: Infant Name Recognition

Children should begin to recognize their own name between 9 and 12 months of age. This represents a facet of early baby language development whereby children begin to link words they hear with the particular object or person they represent. Hopefully, your child has heard her own name frequently, when she is called or spoken to in a loving and nurturing interpersonal interaction, so that she can make this connection earlier than she will for the names of other objects or people.

Because there is a social context to responding to one's name, if your child is not responding to her name by later in the second year of life, it would be a red flag for possible significant developmental-behavioral problems.