The current study examined whether 11-month-old and 12-month-old French infants were able to recognize familiar words in a situation yielding no extra-linguistic cues, before they made identified attempts at producing such words. A head-turn preference paradigm was used to compare infants' interest for familiar words against rare words. Lists of familiar words were auditorily presented to each child from one side, lists of rare words from the other side. A preference for familiar words was found to be very consistent in 12-month-olds, just emerging in 11-montb-olds. These results reveal the existence of a developing receptive lexicon by 11 months, which seems to be closely related to the first production lexicon.