1 Brigaudiot M., Morgenstern A., Nicolas N. (1996) Genesis of the first person. In Children's Language Vol.9. Erlbaum. pp.105-116. "GUILLAUME I VA PAS GAGNER, C'EST D'ABORD MAMAN" GENESIS OF THE FIRST PERSON PRONOUN 1 Mireille BRIGAUDIOT Aliyah MORGENSTERN Catherine NICOLAS INTRODUCTION Since the turn of the twentieth century, we know that between the ages of 2 and 3, children use several linguistic forms to refer to their self as subject of the utterances they produce. In French and in English, the two languages we have studied for this work, the following forms were analyzed by various authors : - preverbal vowels: for example Bloch's daughter (1924) says /a/ in front of nouns but also in front of verbs. This phenomenon has been more recently well described by Loïs Bloom (1970) who gives two possible explanations for the occurrence of /´/ in Erik's data at 1;07 in expressions such as " ´ sit", " ´ home". According to her"one possible source for halshs-00117992, version 1 - 3 Dec 2006 Author manuscript, published in "Children's language - volume 9. (1996) 105-116"