What is Early Intervention?

How do I know if my child is a “late talker”? When should I worry about my child not talking?

When your child is not meeting their developmental milestones, or not yet talking, you may have heard your pediatrician or a fellow parent use the words “late taker.” It is completely normal to be concerned and confused when hearing those words.

Every child meets their milestones at a slightly different time and it can be difficult to know when you need to act on those concerns. If your child is not yet talking by 15 months, it is best to seek Early Intervention. Early Intervention services with a Speech Language Pathologist (SLP) will teach you strategies to help support the development of your child’s receptive and expressive language skills. An SLP can also look for any underlying factors that may contribute to making it difficult for your child to communicate.

What can I do to help my child talk more?

Environmental Arrangement

Parents often try to anticipate their child’s needs. Instead, try to set up opportunities so that your child will need to request your help. Put toys you know your child loves to play with in a box that is difficult to open or on a shelf they cannot reach. Make sure to do this before they enter the play area. When you see what your child wants, encourage yourself to wait 5 seconds to give them an opportunity to ask for it themselves. If they don’t, you should return to auditory bombardment and continue to say the word yourself! It’s important to honor all of your child’s communicative attempts, even if they aren’t exactly how you would have liked them. It is not about your child’s compliance with an expectation, but is instead about giving them the opportunity to express their needs first!

Auditory Bombardment

One of the best evidence-based things you can do at home to support your child’s expressive output is to use a strategy called auditory bombardment. It involves frequent repetition of words and sounds in multiple contexts to help your child build their understanding of words. You can pick one or two words that you’re going to focus on saying as many times as possible, e.g., “Let’s turn it on. It’s on! The light is on. Let’s turn it off. You turned it off. The light is off..” If you feel like a broken record, you’re doing it right.

FAQs

  • If at 15-18 months you’re not hearing any first words, consider a speech evaluation, especially if your child is not babbling yet.

    Early intervention is a great way to reduce the amount of time your child spends in speech therapy.

  • This is an overgeneralization and often prevents boys from getting the support they need early on. Under the age of 24 months, boys have been found more likely to be late talkers.

    Boys also may acquire some specific phonemes (speech sounds) later than girls by a few weeks or months.

    If your son is 24 months and is still not talking, you should seek an evaluation or consultation.

  • No! You should absolutely speak your native language with your child.

    Research has shown that exposure to more than one language does not inhibit cognition or language skills.

    If you only speak Spanish, for example, when at home and your child goes to school with very little exposure to English, there may be a short “silent period” as they take in both languages.

    An evaluation or consultation from a bilingual SLP can be helpful to rule out additional factors relevant to your child’s home language that may be affecting their development.

  • We usually see children begin to form two-word utterances at 24 months. Pay attention to see if your child mixes and matches words, such as: uh-oh ball, my ball, mama ball.

    If your child is not yet saying two-word phrases by 27-28 months, you may want to seek consultation or evaluation.

Let’s review the milestones!

2-4 months — Baby begins to laugh.

4-6 months — Baby should engage in vocal play or quiet grunting sounds, as their vocal track is developing. 

6-10 months — Baby should begin to babble. There are two types:

  • Non-reduplicated babbling is when baby uses differing consonants, e.g., wabamada.

  • Reduplicated is when baby uses the same consonants, e.g., wawawa, bababa, mamama. 

8-12 months —Baby should start to sound like they’re having their own conversation with intonations similar to the language(s) they are exposed to at home.

12-18 months —Baby should begin to say 50-100 words by 18 months. Most of the words baby uses should have a CV shape, meaning they consist of a consonant sound and a vowel sound, e.g., “dah” for dog. Some may have a CVCV shape. Multisyllabic words that baby says may either be simplified or missing syllables, e.g., “baba” for basketball, “moo” for smoothie. Baby should use language to reject, deny or indicate when something is gone or has disappeared.

18-24 months — Your toddler should say 200 to 300 words by 24 months and begin to produce two-word phrases and should likely use telegraphic utterances, e.g., my ball, mama work, dada home, water hot. Telegraphic utterances are phrases that are missing grammatical features, e.g., “water hot,” instead of “The water is hot.” You can affirm what your child says: “Mama eat.” Expand it, and say, “Yes, mama is eating.”

24 months — By 2 years, your child should have acquired at least their “p” sounds. However, you will likely hear other sounds as well, e.g., “b” “m,” “w”.