Doper parents- a language acquisition question

In My Humble Opinion
1

So, the little prince just turned two, and I have some questions about how much he talks.

Background- he seems to be a very bright kid. If you ask him to point out anything in one of his books, he goes right to it. He can follow directions if he feels like it (where did he get THAT, I wonder?), and has a pretty good attention span. He can even recognize words and fonts on black videotapes (same tape color and type color), to pick out the one he wants to watch, and he’s always right!

But he just doesn’t talk much. He has about a dozen short words- car, mama, dada, up, truck, trash, doh (bulldozer), no (his favorite, of course), pop, poop (just learned that one! Daddy is so proud!), etc. He makes himself understood just fine, but without a lot of speech.

I understand that a child is not a textbook, and that every kid is different. The pediatrician said to watch him over the next three months, to see if he starts putting words together into groups or simple sentences. If he doesn’t, maybe some testing is in order. Now, he just spent a week away from the sitter, with me, hubby, my mom & dad, and he seemed to make quite a leap. I think he put a couple of words together on purpose this morning, so I’m waiting for a repeat to confirm it.

So, what is your experience? Any ideas? I know he’s smart, I would just feel better if he talked as much as the other two-year-olds I seem to see around.

2

Language studies that start with 2yos set a spoken word count at “0”. This is due to the incredible variance among language skills of 2yos. Some kids can string 4 and 5 words together and some are still in the repeated syllable stage (ma-ma, da-da, ba-ba [for bottle]).

In investigating your child’s “abilities” you must look at other languag skills, other than just speech (as you commented on). It sounds like EJsGirlsBaby is doing fine with hearing related language skills (pointing when asked, etc.) and with language recognition skills. (knowing that letters and words are used to communicate.

I wouldn’t worry.

SpritleNephew spent many a month around age 2 with his only verbal communication being “Zuh-zuh-zuh”. We joked that one day he would say, “Zuh-zuh-zuh-zuh-zuh ahem so in conclusion, father, I would like to concur with your last statement…”

the babes is doing fine.

3

Spritle, the nephew story made me smile. Apparently, my sis-in-law didn’t say a word for well over two years, then when she was close to three, she blurted out a complete sentence! She has a PhD now, and she’s not even 30 yet. Oh wait, that’s another rant…

I know that his hearing is fine and so is his brain. It’s just that I worry about him communicating when he’s away from us. I’m not sure if he should start a pre-school or similar program until he can talk more. Not that I’m looking to out him in school already, but I’m sure a morning or two a week would help with those social skills!

What about late talkers? Do they catch up and stay up? My sitter has limited English, could that be a factor, if she’s not talking to him enough?

4

As long as your son doesn’t seem to have any hearing impairments and acknowledges that he understands you I wouldn’t worry. Some kids just aren’t talkers.

I have a 4 year old and a 2 year old and they both talk all the time! My daughter was talking in complete sentences by the time she was 2 and it was very easy to understand her. My son is the same way. He doesn’t point at a cookie and grunt until he gets it he says, “I want a cookie mommy.” I haven’t known a lot of two year olds (and I think mine are extra special and super smart. :slight_smile: ) but the ones I have known talk in single words or put 2-3 words together to convey what they want or what they’re thinking. I’m not a child expert and I’m not sure what’s normal. One of my girlfriend’s has a kid who didn’t say more than two words until he was 4 years old!! He literally did not talk. He pointed at everything. He was a very shy little boy and that was part of the problem. He started preschool this year and I guess he’s doing great. He’s starting to talk a lot more and he’s playing with the other kids in his class and getting along just fine. I really think that all kids are different and will do things at their own pace when they’re ready to.

5

Two late talkers here. Older Primafloret shrieked until he was 3 and I got so sick of it I withdrew any co-operation until he used words. He used to only speak when it suited him. At 3 he began talking in full grammatically correct sentences and hasn’t shut up since. He did do speech therapy for an articulation problem at 5.

Primafloret the Younger has very real problems. At 4, he’s got a wide vocabulary but he doesn’t talk much. We saw a speech therapist when he was 3 but she wanted to teach him sign language. This probably had a lot to do with the fact he flatly refused to talk to her at all and she thought I was barking mad when I said he had any language at all. So he remains an ongoing project.

At 2, if I had concerns I would have hearing checked especially if there is a history of ear infections. If there is any autism in the family, I’d watch closely for language development but I wouldn’t panic because your kid sounds well within the norms. I’d check out how much the sitter is talking to your child though. Receptive language is very important and if that seems normal, I’d relax :slight_smile:

6

Yes. I’m a hobby linguist (if that’s a word) and language acquisition isn’t really my cup o’ tea, but I’ll say this: no input, no output. Make sure she has a lot of books to read to him. I take it she’s just not very fluent, but she does speak English? If so, she’ll be very able to read to him. And I do think a day or two in pre-school could be a very good idea. Maybe it’ll make him have to speak more, out of plain necessity. I doubt any pre-school teacher would say “No, he’s not welcome, he can’t communicate”.

Good luck, and don’t worry.

7

Maybe he just doesn’t have anything important to say.

Seriously, if his hearing is fine, I wouldn’t worry about it too much. We have two kids with totally different start up speeds:

The girl - at one year old was walking, talking, singing, etc. By two years old she spoke with near perfect grammar (unfortunately since “unlearned”), very good pronunciation. By three she was correcting my French (which we were all learning due to a relocation).

The boy - at one year made rudimentary sounds, dada, mama, etc. At two had some simple words, but not much vocabulary, quite similar to your case. Since the girl came first we were feeling a bit panicky. Plus the words he did speak he struggled to pronounce (s = th, l & r = w, etc). But by three years old his vocabulary was growing faster than his sister’s had at the same age. He loves dinosaurs which he knows by name and can say reasonably well: diplodocus, pachycephlosaurus, rhinonychus, baryonyx, composognathus. Trust me, these are not easy for me to pronounce. And he always seems to use a $5 word when a 10 cent word would do just fine. He’s 3.5 yo now and sometimes corrects his nearly six year old sister when she’s reading.

My advice: get his hearing tested (as Rachelle said), relax, and read to him alot. He’ll talk when he’s ready.

Also, if the sitter doesn’t speak English particularly well you might insist that she only speak to him in her native tongue. Our nanny in Thailand didn’t speak any English, and this may have slowed things down a bit at the time, but your son can use this opportunity to learn some extra phonemes, if not the actual language.

8

Just a warning on if the sitter speaks to him in her native language - kids raised in a bilingual environment tend to talk later than those who are raised in a home where only one language is spoken.

That said, he sounds a LOT like my son (and the way my daughter is shaping up to be). Few words until 2.5 - preschool at 3.5 = BOOM - word explosion! He is in speech therapy now at age 4.5 and has been for a year due to an articulation delay, but his vocabulary is years ahead.

We read a lot and talk a lot to him, and it helps. He was not around other kids much at all until age 3.

Hope this was a little helpful.

9

I wouldn’t worry to much about the bilingual thing. As long as your sitter is talking to him a lot, he’ll learn. Our babysitter spoke to our kids in Portuguese about half the time and they were both early talkers. A little girl who stays with my son’s new sitter has French/English bilingual parents and she’s very advanced for her age in both languages.

I think it does help to work with them a bit. Name things, ask them questions. He could move on from pointing to naming things in books. Kids that age also like to repeat things they hear. My son was a little parrot a few months ago. (He turned two in July.)

10

My son turned two about a month ago. His language skills are improving. Until just a few weeks ago, in fact, he wasn’t doing much more than jabbering. He jabbered a lot, but it was still just jabber. Lately, though, he’s been saying a lot more actual words. No sentences yet, but he’s getting better at getting his point across.

But he’s also got an older sister and brother here, too. That may have something to do with it. My daughter is four, and my stepson is eight (and he’s only been living with us for a couple of weeks now). My daughter didn’t have her older brother around all the time, so her language skills developed a little more slowly. She jabbered like my son, but she didn’t start making any real sense until she was closer to age three. We talked and read to her alot, and soon enough, everything fell in to place.

I wouldn’t worry too much. Sounds to me like he’s just fine. Keep talking & reading to him. He’ll get everything together pretty quickly.

11

I am amazed at how quickly things can change, too. I remember that when comparing notes with other parents at 18 months and 24 months (not that I did this a lot, but some moms volunteered a lot on my moms email list) Cranky Jr didn’t seem to have as many words as other kids his age. But after we bought a toy where the child has to identify things, I discovered he could find items I didn’t even know he knew the words for! He had great understanding and a pretty good vocabulary in his head. He just wasn’t saying much yet. He didn’t even take to much of the sign language we had been using since he was a baby.

Once he did start talking, I started writing down all his words. Amazing how many they use, and in what order they learn to use them. “Broken!” and “Stuck!” were hugely important words early on.

Also, my son was very late to use (and identify people by) their proper names or relationship to him. He just didn’t call anyone anything, except us (Mom and Daddy) I thought that was weird.

Now, at 2 1/2 he’s a chatterbox and a few people have told us he appears to be ahead of the curve now. He caught up in spades. I don’t think you have to worry yet.

12

EJsGirl, how do you KNOW his hearing is fine…has he been tested? If he has, then you can disregard the rest of this.

However, if he hasn’t had his hearing tested by an audiologist I would suggest you do this. In the millieu of parents with deaf or hard-of-hearing kids of which I have been a member for the last 21 months there are tons of stories about kids whose parents didn’t think they had a hearing problem, then brought them in to be tested and found out they did. Kids have been known to teach themselves how to read lips. Homemade “bang two pot lids together behind his back” tests are unreliable because the child could be getting other info, such as a wave of pressure that he has learned to recognize as a sound. Also, a child who is not deaf but merely missing some frequencies would probably pass this kind of test, but still not be getting enough audio input to learn spoken language easily.

Primary care physicians (pediatricians) are notoriously BAD at recognizing hearing problems in infants or toddlers, and seem to be reluctant to send them for audiological testing. It isn’t really their fault, because most pediatricians will only come across one or two cases of hearing loss in their careers. But this is why many states, including where I live (Mass.) have instituted mandatory screening for hearing loss for all infants before they leave the hospital.

It was just such a test that told us that the Little Lagomorph had a problem, and more extensive tests have shown he has a mild to moderate hearing loss in the mid frequencies. Such a loss would formerly have gone undetected for a long time, possibly 2-3 years, during which we would have missed precious prime language acquisition time. As it was, we were able to get him hearing aids and intensive speech therapy, so that at 21 months he is basically on target with his talking and listening!

I don’t want to scare you, or anyone else, but a hearing test would be an easy first step, and will hopefully put your mind that much more at ease.

P.S. I’ve been considering starting up an “Ask the parent of the hearing-impaired toddler” thread, but wasn’t sure there would be enough interest.

13

I can’t say that I would know whether anything is wrong or not, but I just wanted to add my two pennies to the pot. Make sure that no one is talking for him. In other words, don’t let someone be so anxious to get him what he wants, that they try to say what he wants before he gets a chance to articulate it. And also, if someone asks him a question, don’t let someone automatically answer for him (unless, of course, it’s a question he would not know the answer to.). I had a nephew who could have talked earlier than he did, had his older brother not kept doing all these things (and you’d have to know this kid to realize that it was not to be helpful–it was to hog all the attention). He was 2 1/2 before he started doing much more than pointing and grunting for what he wanted. But this was because he wasn’t given much of a chance to do anything else.

Again, I don’t presume to know that this is the problem–if there’s a problem at all. Just something you might want to be on the watch for, that’s all! :slight_smile:

14

I didn’t talk much until I was about four, and at that point I got some speech therapy. It turned out that my brain was running ahead of my mouth; I couldn’t keep up with what was going through my head, so my speech (what there was of it) was garbled and only immediate family could understand much of what I said. Once I was made to understand what was going on, I learned to stop and regroup when necessary.

This still happens. Sometimes, mid-statement, I have to stop, take a breath, organize my thoughts, and start over. And I have a tendency to babble at times; I tell people who know me that they can always tell me to cut it out. But neither of these create serious problems for me anymore.

I have no idea whether this has anything to do with your situation but I wouldn’t worry too much. It can’t hurt to get a consult, but I suspect your kid is quite normal.

15

EJsGIRL --> Don’t worry, everything is going to work out fine. Language develops, like everything else, differently for everybody.

An anecdote: I didn’t speak for more than two years. Only “mama” and “dada” and “wawa”, but nothing resembing normal speech for a two year old. Then one day, my parents brought home a baby brother for me to play with and I got extremely jealous or something. While everyone was adoring the newborn, I blurted out the words “I want some chicken from the kitchen!” True story. I gets told over and over again at seemingly every family function we have. And guess what, I turned almost half normal.

16

I’ll second that; my almost-two-year-old gets exposed to English and Chinese all the time (much more Chinese than English), and he’s babbling away at all hours. I think his vocabulary is about 80+ words right now, with about a 40%-60% split in favor of Chinese. I figure he’ll learn a lot of English once he starts going to preschool someday. :slight_smile:

If bilingualism impars speech development, I haven’t seen it.

17

My brother was also a late talker…or so everyone thought. When he did start talking, it was in complete sentences.

Mom thought this was pretty interesting, but a little strange. Then she caught him practicing. You see, he wouldn’t trot out new words/phrases for public use until he was sure he was using them properly.

To add to the massive chorus, don’t worry about it…yet.

18

Actually, preschool is a good idea for kids who are non-verbal (or close to it.) I work in a special ed pre-school/kindergarten, and I know that’s the primary reason some of our younger class was idenified for early intervention. They receive speech therapy as part of the program. The SAU should be able to tell you what programing is in your area.

It’s good to bear in mind what people say about every child being different, though. One of our students is developmentally delayed, and at almost 3.5 uses just half a dozen spoken words. However her receptive language is normal for her age, and we’re working on using muliple signs(she has a sense of humor too, I asked her this week why she was laughing after accidentally head-butting me while jumping. “That’s funny” she signed) There doesn’t seem to be any physical reason she doesn’t talk(at least not one a score of doctors has detected) and her hearing is fine, so I’m sure she’ll catch up eventually. Another child in the class turned 3 in October. He didn’t start speaking more than the occasional word until August, and he has a huge vocabulary and speaks in complete, gramatically correct sentences now.

If he doesn’t start talking on his own soon, maybe teaching him ASL will help until he does, it certainly makes self-expression a far less frustrating experience for the first student I mentioned- not to mention that it’s better to try to express herself than have the grown ups play guessing games. Some of the infant programs in my area teach ASL to children who are only a few months old, so I guess kids make the connection between signs and words quite early :slight_smile:

19

The Rykid spoke single words for quite a while, then he went through a short phase where he spoke in his own language just before he turned two.

Him: “Jakaw bo dooey humnat fiff waddabum?”

Me: “What? Show me.”

Him: Toddles off to the kitchen and points at the refrigerator.

Me: Opens refrigerator

Him: Reaches straight for a juice box and hands it to me to open.

I open it and hand it back. He takes it and toddles back to whatever it was he was doing.

The foreign language phase didn’t last long, but I sure got a kick out of it. He was speaking complete sentences very soon after.

20

I think that your kid sounds like my daughter. She was still pretty much in that “one word sentence” phase up to her second birthday. Shortly afterward, her language skills just exploded. Leaps and bounds and complete sentences. Now, she’s almost five and won’t shut up, especially when she is talking about Triceratops or Parasaurolophus :).