Red Flag #5
Alright– halfway through our top ten red flags!
Let’s jump into Red Flag #5:
If you as the parent can not understand most to all of your two year old’s speech, it’s time to seek help from a speech-language pathologist.
A two year old should be able to pronounce at least 50% of the words they are using intelligibly. It doesn’t mean they are pronouncing all of the sounds in the word correctly, but rather you should be able to understand what they are attempting to communicate to you.
For example, maybe your little one would like some more cookies. They might come up to you, tug at your shirt, and say “tookie pease“! You can see from my example that the words are not perfectly pronounced, but you can make out or understand what they are communicating.
On the other hand, if your two year old comes up to you, tugs at your shirt, points at the cookie box and just grunts, or maybe they just say, “uh, uh”, your speech and language antenna should go up! If this is your two year old’s typical pattern of communicating, it’s time to go see a speech-language pathologist for an evaluation.
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2 Responses to “Red Flag #5”
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I have a comment I have twin boys that are two years and four months old. I ahve one that loves to talk and one that says a few things but not much. I have read studies with twins that one twin is always more dominating than the other and the other feels like they dont have to speak because the other twin does it for them. They also have their own language between the two of them. Is this a concern for me if one is not communicating as much. Thank you for your time.
Hi Stephanie!
Thanks for reading my blog…now, on to your concern…
It’s not uncommon for one twin to be more dominant than the other, and therefore more communicative. However, when this quieter twin does communicate, does he try to use two word phrases and have a vocabulary of at least 50 words?
Try to focus on your twins as individuals without neccesarily comparing them, which I’m sure is hard! If the less dominant twin is able to communicate appropriately for his age, but just does so less frequently, than I wouldn’t be concerned. Perhaps you may have to start gently reminding the other twin to give his brother a chance to talk!
But, if the less dominant twin doesn’t seem to be meeting general speech and language developmental milestones, perhaps you might want to consider a speech and language evaluation. I hope this helps!