Learning to Talk - Vocabulary

[Skippy]

My grandson is 17 months in a trilingual home.  In English he says "Kah" and points to the cat, cup, car, clock,. Does this count as actually saying 4 words. ??  How does one count how many words the baby knows?  How clearly does baby need to say the word for it to count as "knowing how to say that word"?  What are the levels of speech??  For example, What if only the mother knows what babys says, OR
What if Baby can speak plain enough so that anyone can tell or at least make an intelligent guess. 

[Nikita]

My 21 month old is saying a lot of words now, and I understand most of them. Usually she cant say the end of the word, but just because she cant pronounce longer words properly doesnt mean she isnt speaking English. She also seems to have a bit of a lisp (the "th" instead of "s" sound). It's cute. it doesnt mean she cant speak, it's just babyish speaking, and based on the positioning of her jaw, teeth, and tongue...if the teeth arent exactly in the right spot, the tongue cant press behind them to make the sounds correctly. But it's speeech. People can understand most of it. She knows what she's talking about, and often can gesture or sign to clarify. It's communication orally. It's speech.
Sometimes it requires some deciphering. For instance "I dummy" can mean "my dummy" or it means "I'm jumping". So if she points to a dummy (pacifier) or starts jumping, I know which one she means.
She says "Kah" for cat (as in, the word without the t on the end), but probably "Kah" for car, cup and clock is a bit too obscure...but the issue is does she know what she's trying to say. (Knowing the sign would help clarify this). But pointing to the object and sounding it's first letter sound is trying to say the word. And clock is very tricky..trying to say the "c' and the "l" sound is not easy. But probably we'd expect the sounds "kah, kuh, and Koh" for the different words. If that happened, then I'd count them as seperate (or separate? always confuse those two) words..

[Quiet Cricket]

My son had a period of a number of months (13-17 months old, maybe?) when his vocabulary was expanding every day but he still did not have many multi-syllable words or put the ending consonants on words.  I counted a separate vocabulary word for every word that I could decipher has having meaning.  I was showing him a few signs, which helped decipher between words sometimes ("ba" was both banana and ball, but he had the sign for banana, so I knew when he was asking to eat a banana versus play with a ball!)  Suddenly around 18-19 months he started putting ending consonants on his words, he hit the "explosive" stage for vocabulary, adding multiple words per day, and his speech became increasingly understandable by people besides me.  At 22 months or so he was saying 2-word sentences and that quickly evolved to sentences of 3, 4, 5, 6, and then 7 words within several months.  At 25 months, everyone comments on how verbal he is.  So, I don't think you have anything to worry about...in a few months the language will probably explode by leaps and bounds.

You are SO lucky to be able to offer your child a tri-lingual environment.  WOW!! How great!  I have read that kids in multi-lingual homes tend to develop their verbal skills later, because they are processing multiple languages and are just internalizing a lot of it before figuring out the physical part of speaking.  With three languages, there are a lot more sounds to figure out! 

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