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Abstract: The article deals with the factors defining the creative potential of child speech. Special significance is assigned to heuristic mechanisms responsible for the system‘s sharp ―nose‖, typical of a child at the stage of self-learning a language (in the period of pre-school ontogenesis). The article substantiates the idea about a close relationship between the compensatory function (compensating for the lexical deficit) and the conventional game function of child speech innovations. The experimental nature of child speech discloses the spontaneous quick wit of the child by potential semantic filling of ―ready-made‖ and ―invented‖ words, including the ability ―to think by means of imagery analogy‖. Object standards that lie at the basis of intentional or unintentional metaphors are characterized in the light of child mentality (―personification of everything‖, dominants of personal meaning, etc.). In the situation of ―ignoring‖ the norm, intuition, as a heuristic vector of child linguistic mentality, ―prompts‖ them a non-standard solution. The article describes the strategy of word manipulation in the child‘s communication with grown-ups as one of the early forms of manifestation of intention to language games. Literal interpretation of phraseological units is analyzed as the language game resource. The article presents a fragment of the vocabulary of ―aphoristic literalisms‖ of child speech. Transition of child heuristics into a ―conscious‖ state is considered to be the basic principle of organization of training verbal creativity.