What is Late Talking?

How do I know if my child is a late talker?

A late talker is a child 18 - 35 months who is delayed in developing their speaking skills. Typically, late-talking toddlers have a good understanding of language, motor, social, and play skills, but they do not say as many words as other children their age. They may take longer to learn new words and start putting words together into sentences later than expected. This phenomenon is also called "late language emergence", you may also hear late talkers referred to as being "language delayed".

We don't actually have a well-defined, research definition of a late talker. For our purposes, we will go by this guideline: 

A child is a late talker if they are 24 months or older and:

• Says fewer than 50 words; and/or isn’t combining 2 words together to make a phrase
• They do not have a delay in another area of development (e.g., autism spectrum disorder, receptive language delay, motor delays).

Depending on the study, anywhere from 9-21% of toddlers are late talkers. Late talkers generally fall within the 10th percentile or below for expressive language measures.

What Are the Risk Factors for Late Talking?

There are some risk factors for a child becoming a late talker that parents should be aware of:

Family History: Children with a history of late talkers in their family are twice as likely to be late talkers
Gender: Boys are 3 times more likely to be late talkers than girls
Prematurity: Children who are born with a birth weight less than 85% of the ideal weight or born before 37 weeks are twice as likely to be late talkers
Siblings: Children with siblings are twice as likely to be late talkers compared to those without siblings

How many words should my child be saying?

One of the first questions I get when other parents find out I am a speech-language pathologist is, “How many words should my child be saying?”.

I have noticed that most parents know that by their child’s first birthday, they should have at least one or two words, but it gets murkier in the following months. When I polled a group of parents about what their pediatricians told them about the number of words they should expect by 18 months, the range was surprising.

To make matters worse, the CDC adjusted its milestones guide in February 2022. Their goal was to simplify the referral process, but they actually made it worse!

The CDC intended to report milestones that represent what most children (75%) are doing by a certain age rather than the average at that age. Unfortunately, they did not consult an SLP in forming the language milestones.

Several milestones need to be more accurate to what a child functioning at the first quartile looks like per research. The CDC has grossly underestimated how many words a child should have at 18 months, 24 months, and 30 months.

Here is the chart; please do not refer to the CDC milestones for tracking your child’s expressive vocabulary development.

Expressive Vocabulary Milestone Differences

The average child uses 50 words by 18 months and 200-300 words by 24 months. You should also be hearing two-word combinations (beginning phrases and sentences!) by age 2. As you can see, the difference between what the CDC reports and what the average looks like is significant. If you need help counting how many words your child says, we can help with that in our blog post What Counts As A Word, Anyway?

I was a late talker and I was just fine.

Many late talkers do catch up! Some research cites 70% of children who are late talkers do catch up by the late preschool and elementary years. However, these "late bloomers" often continue to show observable weaknesses in the area of oral language development even through high school.

Roughly 30% of children who do not have 50 words or combine words into phrases by 2 go on to be diagnosed with a language-based disability such as developmental language disorder (DLD) or a developmental disability such as autism. In these cases, language is always an area of difficulty.

At times, parents might not be concerned about their child's speech delay, particularly if they themselves were late talkers and eventually caught up. It's perfectly acceptable to hold off on intervention if that feels right to you. If you opt not to pursue early intervention, it’s OK! Making small  adjustments to how you use and model language for your child can prove incredibly beneficial to your child with delayed speech. We provide strategies on our website that you can employ with your late talker. Should you have a change of heart and sense that your child requires one-on-one therapy, speech and language therapy will be available. If you are worried but would like to give your child the gift of some more time, you may consider pursuing an assessment or getting on a waiting list now, some areas have long waiting lists for speech therapy.

Late Talking and Developmental Language Disorder

Developmental language disorder is a disorder in which a person experiences difficulties understanding and using language. People with developmental language disorder don’t have another biomedical diagonsis such as autism that by definition causes difficulty with language. 

DLD can affects various aspects of language, including vocabulary, grammar, comprehension, and communication. Children with developmental language disorders may struggle with speaking, understanding instructions, forming sentences, and interacting effectively with others.

As mentioned above, a lack of word combinations at 24 months is correlated to a later language disorder; however, this alone only identified about half of the children with DLD. If you add in a family history of communication or reading disorders, and this resulted in the identification of 90% of children diagnosed with speech or language impairment (another term for DLD) in a predictive model (Rudolph and Leonard, 2016).

What are the risk factors for DLD?

The biggest risk factors for a developmental language disorder are:

• Late talking
• A family history of communication or reading disorders
• Prematurity (less than 37 weeks gestation)
• Being male
• “Very low” 5 minute APGAR score at birth
• A younger sibling in a large family
• Parents with few years of education

Are you worried about your late talking toddler?
Are you worried about your late-talking toddler? In this case, let’s turn “wait and see” to “let’s just see.” Our best advice is to trust your gut; parents know their own kid best. You can self-report to your state’s early intervention program if your pediatrician wants to take a “wait and see” approach and that doesn’t sit right with you. You can learn more about how to access your state’s early intervention program in our article “How to Access Early Intervention Speech Therapy”.