What Were Your child(ren)'s Spoken Word Milestones?

[queriquita]

  that's how i felt today when i was informed that typical spoken words on a child's 2nd birthday is between 100-200 words.  SAY WHAT??? does this sound right to you?  i phoned a few EL friends today and confirmed that their children's milestones were much more in line with my kids, but, still ... 100-200 words TOTAL by 24 months?  How common is this in this community?  despite my source being a very well respected expert in infant development, i still had to look this up, and low and behold, here's what i found, all validating those numbers, or even less!! 

*** 19 - 24 months: fewer than 50 words (http://www.babycenter.com/0_developmental-milestone-talking_6573.bc)
*** 24 - 36 months: " Development experts say most 2-year-olds have a vocabulary of at least 50 words, and that by age 3 they'll have about 200." (http://www.babycenter.com/0_developmental-milestones-understanding-words-behavior-and-co_6575.bc)
*** 18 months - 10 words!! (http://www.webmd.com/parenting/guide/baby-talk-your-babys-first-words)
*** 15-22 months - 20 - 30 words (http://www.parenting.com/article/baby-speech-milestones?page=0,2)


of course, how surprised should i really be when as recently as last year science was ready to report that yes, you can actually talk to your baby before they're one!  why does so much of our society wait around for a scientist to prove something first? here's the link to that, if you're interested in the study that validates that "your baby can understand!" (http://www.livescience.com/18469-infants-understand-words.html).

i'll also add that i'm aware of plenty of people who were very late talkers who developed into amazing and well-educated individuals, so i'm not saying it's everything.  i'm mostly trying to get a feel for what is the norm in this community, too.

so, inquiring mind(s) want to know ... was this your experience?   when did you guys hear the first word?  the first, i dunno, 10-20 words?  the first 50?  when did you stop counting?  was this about the time you experienced a word explosion, and when did you get a sense that the rate of their word acquisition surprised you (several new words a day)?

thanks all!

[PokerDad]

I remember this because it was my most recent blog post (sadly)... around 35 words at 14 months, and I stopped counting long ago. He says all the main colors except orange and all the numbers to ten except 7. That's about 20 just with those  . He names every letter except N. Between just those, we're at 45 and we haven't even gotten to his vocabulary ha ha.

For reference, today is Cub's 17 month birthday.

Actually, this has been an interest of mine. I've been wanting to get a language development inventory textbook that has the norms and standard deviations by age broken out just to really see the difference. I don't know where to go for this, and most materials are geared towards late acquisition. If you come across researched norms like this, let me know 

[elaida]

I remember getting the BabyCenter email with link to speech milestones a few weeks ago, looking at it, and thinking, "yeah, whatever."
I think there is a wide range, and it depends a lot on the home environment, how parents interact with the child, and the child's personality/interests.

DS is 16 months now, but we stopped counting a long time ago. First words were shortly before 12 months. By 13 months, there were at least 20. At this point, DS can repeat most sounds, so I can ask him to say "ah", and he'll try to repeat (some sounds are more successful than others). He has at least 30 words that he says frequently (multiple times in a day) on his own initiative. They center around animals (many are animal sounds, that he uses to identify animals), vehicles, and food and also include things like mama/papa, bye-bye, good night, wet, cold/hot, moon, star, egg, bath, bubble, circle, blue, wow, uh-oh, ow. There's another set of words that he will use to answer us with, if we ask him a question, but he doesn't initiate those words on his own, like bathroom/pee/poo (Do you need to pee now? Do you want to go to the bathroom?). They also include harder to pronounce words like squirrel.

His vocabulary (words that he understands), though, is much greater than that. I'd put it at around 200 words. He knows most of the 100 words and 100 animals books that we have. He will spend hours asking us to do books with him. Most of the books are vocabulary books (pictures of objects). He's clearly trying to learn vocabulary. When doing books or various apps, we often do them in "where is x?" mode and he points out the object. That's how we know what he understands. We also do emotion and action flashcards (as well as other topics) through the free Bitsboard app (using iPad). He understands most of those as well, but doesn't say any of the words yet.

He can definitely pick up several new words in a day, if given the opportunity (exposure to new things that he finds interesting). At this point, he's being slowed down by his parents, who don't have the time to bring in new stuff, so we mostly repeat using things we have used with him before.

As far as EL goes, I think we do very little compared to most people here. We did Little Reader for a few months, then summer vacation rolled around and then daycare started, and we never got back into it again. I've tried the last few weeks to do Little Reader again, a few times a week. We don't own/watch any DVDs. We have a small collection of books, maybe around 20 now (only 8 or so get used regularly), plus 3 sets of baby words board books (2 sets of 10 books (Green Start Book Towers - I'm not wild about these) and 1 set of 6 books (Chinese/English collection - good if you ignore the occasional mistranslated English)). I think what Little Reader did for DS was to teach him that a word represents a concept that can have many incarnations (real-life picture, cartoon representation, sound, etc). Since he understands that words represents things or concepts (wet/cold/wow), he wants to learn words. He's pretty self-motivated to learn.

On the other hand, my niece at 21 months had about 3 spoken words. I don't think there is any EL and not much interest in books in that household. So, there is quite a range. When we went to visit (DS was 14 months at the time/niece was 21 months), I asked to go to the zoo. We did go, and afterwards, my brother/wife commented that they didn't understand why I wanted to go to the zoo, but understood once we were there, since DS knew so many animals. I did not realize until I was at the zoo that it was not the best suggestion for my niece, since she didn't know any animals. So, I think what kids are exposed to at home makes a bit of difference.

I also think things might have been different if DS had been in daycare earlier. I don't think his daycare does much to stimulate vocabulary learning, but it does allow him the opportunity to play with a wide variety of toys (good, since we live in a small house and refuse to buy most toys). Although they read books in daycare, they don't do it in the same way that we do at home. Some of their book reading is waving the picture book at the kids while listening to a CD sing the book. It's probably fun, but doesn't provide the same kind of educational experience.

So, I think many of the cited references are probably true for a large number of kids, but probably also low for a large number of kids that grow up in richer learning environments, and that the personality of the child (whether the child wants to vocalize or not) and how parents respond and encourage a child to talk play a role as well. I've read a number of "encourage your kids to talk" books (recently, after the fact) and found that I was already doing many of the suggestions (like make reading a book a "fill in the word" experience). I think things like that really help, but not everyone knows to do that.

[Korrale4kq]

After being involved in a very active online community of children born the same month as my son I would say the numbers are about right. The low numbers that is. This is from reading all the concerned posts from about the 150+ active mothers. By many kids 2nd birthday very few kids were exceeding several handfuls of words. With the rare exception there were very few boys, all the better talkers were girls and may have began talking a little at about the 16 month mark.

Having a son who was speech delayed (despite doing all those "right" vocabulary enhancing things) gave me a lot of access to children that were assessed for early intervention. The consensus was that boys and girls do verbally develop different. James' EI specialist has never once in 7 years qualified a girl for a speech delay (without there being another underlying issue), however about 2/3 of her children that qualified at 2 years old were boys that only had a speech delay. Out of those boys about 3/4 of them graduated (no longer has a speech delay) before they were 3. James had 17 kids in his class over the 1.5 years that he was in EI and only 4 of them (including James) qualified for an IEP at 3.

[Nikita]

My 4th child (girl) who was a baby when I started on the Brillkids forum said "hello" at 10 weeks (due to mimicking older siblings etc who said that to her a lot. I then discovered that other babies had been recorded on Youtube saying hello at that age too...unfortunately I didnt have a recording of it...my next daughter did not do this and also wasnt interested in watching YBCR or doing Brillkids on the computer. At first she was diagnosed with glue ear..and at 3 and a half was diagnosed with high frequency hearing loss. So lack of speech can be due to glue ear (very common) or even a permanent hearing problem. Not to mention all the wax kids have in their ears...that can only be removed at that age by ear candling. (Try it..it's shocking what comes out!!). O nw have a baby son (11 weeks) who is trying to say words. He's had an extensive hearing test due to the possibly genetic condition and so far all seems good. I definitely see the difference in my daughter who wasnt interested in speaking!

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