The term late talkers is used to describe children younger than two-and-a-half-years-old who have small expressive vocabularies. There are different cutoffs for late talking, but Master of Science in Speech-Language Pathology faculty Kristen Ipson, MS, CCC-SLP, and ElBea Stonier, MS, CCC-SLP, define late talkers as children who are 18-months, have fewer than 10 words, and aren’t expressing a variety of words, especially nouns and verbs. Likewise, at 24-months, late talkers have fewer than 100 words or are not frequently combining words.
Milestones vs Steady Growth
The children who are late talkers generally have no other significant developmental concerns. They look and act like other kids their age in most ways but just aren’t really using spoken language yet. It’s not always helpful to look specifically at the milestones that any individual child has met. For example, at 18 months, we should be seeing regular steady growth and change in the kinds of language a child is learning. So, if they had 50 words at 18 months and they only have 55 words at 20 months, that shows little growth over time. We need to look at the child’s rate of progress or how quickly they are learning something new, as well as how they are actually using those skills.
Parents Should Trust Their Instincts
For kids that fall into the late talker category, we often see parents being told to wait and see; they’re doing enough; let’s give them a bit of time. It’s true that about 70 percent of children who are initially late talkers appear to catch up. But it is very hard to know which kids will catch up, which kids will continue to show significant delays, and which kids will look like they’ve caught up but will still struggle with some aspects of language, reading, or writing as they get older.
One of the best pieces of advice for parents is to follow your instincts. Parents are really good at being able to identify when something isn’t quite right–don’t wait. When your instincts are telling you something is off, seek help.
That help can start with a primary care medical provider or a speech-language pathologist (SLP). An SLP will collaborate with parents to help them learn different strategies that create a better language learning environment for their child and allow for more opportunities to practice using language during their day-to-day routines. There are early intervention programs that can help.
Listen to the full RMUpload podcast episode here.
Additional Resources:
Rocky Mountain University Center for Communications Disorders (pro-bono speech clinic)
The Hanen Center “‘Do Late Talkers Grow Out of It?’”
The Hanen Center “Later Talkers…What We Know, and What We Don’t”
The Hanen Center “The Power of Turn-taking: How Back-and-forth Interactions Help Children Learn Language”
