Thanks,
Vanessa Mares

Thank you very much for the lovely Christmas card! I just finished reading your Christmas letter. Reading it was a delight.

I was glad to visit your blog, beyondbabytalk.com and spend a little time there. I encourage you in your aspirations, my dear. You go girl!

You are uniquely you, Jill. Moms in our world need to hear what beautiful you have to impart to them. Their personal lives will be impacted by not only the expertise you can provide them in their child’s speech and language development; but they will be impacted in modeling of the beautiful tone and compassion you purpose in the raising of your own daughter.

Raj and I offer our love, support and encouragement as you and David scale new heights!

I’ll quote something back to you from your own Christmas letter, Jill…”May you receive everything HE has in His heart for you!”

With Love,
Cherie Doraisamy

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!

Thank you for your patience in waiting for my response. I have been out of town!

The best time for a child to learn multiple languages is when they are very young! Children who are under 5 are in the best position to learn two languages because their brains are like a sponge. Their brains are literally being wired for language at this time in their young lives.

If a child is being taught two different languages, like Emma for example, it’s beneficial when the languages are spoken by different adults. This appears to be the case with Emma. Her Mother speaks to her in English, and her Grandparents speak to her in Italian. This allows the child to experience the language completely and separately and thus avoid any possible confusion. It’s a good sign that Emma appears to understand both languages.

It’s often not uncommon that children in bilingual homes or situations take just a little bit longer to acquire language, because they are doing double duty by having to process two different languages. And some children don’t need any extra time at all; they just pick up two languages without a beat!

With that being said, I would like to address Emma’s actual verbal expression. Does she have at least a 25 word vocabulary (in English)and is beginning to put two words together at this point? Are the words that she is using clear enough to be understood at least part of the time by an unfamiliar listener? If this is not the case, it may be time to seek out a local speech pathologist for an evaluation.

I’m not exactly sure how old Emma is, but she should definitely be using words more than gestures at this time to communicate her needs. Perhaps you could gently encourage her mother to encourage Emma to use her words more often! Children at this age will still use some gibberish or ‘jargon’ as we say in speech pathology, but the words should be outweighting the jargon by this time.

If this encouragement from Mom doesn’t produce any results with Emma, than I would certainly consider an evaluation.

I hope this answered your question, Adele. Thank you so much for visiting my site and stay tuned for more great information!

Blessings!
Debra