Is My Child’s Speech Delayed?

Speech refers to the actual sounds of spoken language. When toddlers are learning to speak, they are trying to coordinate all the different muscles of the lips, tongue, and jaw and it’s a complex process. Errors are to be expected and we are here to help.

Based on a cross-linguistic review of 27 languages, McLeod & Crowe (2018) concluded “children across the world acquire consonants at a young age. By five years old, children have acquired most consonants within their ambient language; however, individual variability should be considered.”

See below to identify when 90-100% of children will achieve sounds.

How Many Words Should My Child Say?

This is one of the most commonly asked questions we get as speech-language pathologists! The truth is, the answer can be complicated…

The chart below outlines the most common milestones used in speech-language assessments and in a variety of online sources. A child reaches each speech milestone when they have the number of words that MOST children have by the given age (example: 12 months: 1 word). However, while this does qualify as meeting their milestone, you can also see that MOST 12-month-olds actually are able to produce 2-6 words. Therefore, that higher number of words, or “average” for your child’s age, should also be considered.