Ming clarifies that most children called "speech delayed" actually have language delays, not pronunciation problems. The AAP expects single words by 15-18 months and two-word phrases by 18-24 months. A late talker, per the Hanen Center, is 18-30 months old with good understanding but few spoken words.
Hey, this is ming here from agentsofspeech.com in this video we'll be talking about what is speech delay? Okay, speech delay is a term that is dreaded by all parents, no matter if it's your firstborn, your second or third child. It's always a nightmare to hear this term used on your child. No matter if it's a doctor, a therapist, it's your kindergarten teacher, your relatives, people who are around you and your child talking about it. It really does put a lot of pressure on you guys. So right now we're gonna talk about speech delay. And in my opinion, it's actually quite misused and misunderstood. Okay, so speech delay is kind of used to describe children who are two to three years old who haven't started to speak that well yet. And according to the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2009, so it's kind of dated, your two year old should be able to communicate by pointing to object or picture when, when it's named for him. Recognizes names of familiar people, objects and body parts. Says several single words by 15 to 18 months. Uses simple phrases by 18 to 24 months, uses two to four word sentences. Now that's quite key. So some children who are two year old can actually do two or four word sentences, follow simple instructions. Repeats words overheard in conversations. So I'm going to drop the link for this article article in the description below so you can take a look at it. But it's actually just a simple Google search. Okay, this is the information out there. This information might be outdated and general and basic, but experience tells me that's about right. And this is the norm, meaning the average child who is 2 year old should be able to do this kind of, kind of stuff. And I'm telling you that most English speaking, or actually even in Cantonese or Chinese, they follow similar footsteps. There is a norm, there's an average. Some children will be slightly slower but still normal and some children might be faster and they would still be considered as like normal developing. If your child doesn't do some or most of any of the things on the list, then your child might be at a risk of delay. And the key word here is the word risk at the moment in time. If you hadn't had a thorough assessment by a therapist or a doctor, it's very hard to say whether there is a delay or not. So speech delay is actually understood by the general as a term that talks about a child having difficulties or unable to actually communicate with others, especially you and their teachers and their peers. Which isn't entirely correct because we would say that a child has problems in communication, not just speech. Because in communication, there are actually two parts to it. There's speech and language and speech. Without getting into the definitions, speech is actually just the sounds coming from our mouths that make actual sense to a human. You would call a child doing silly noises, babbling. And language is actually just common words, signs, symbols. What words are symbols? Right. Most of us understand as a. As a community. Right. That's actually language. You use speech to turn language into a spoken language. And in most cases, children who have a language delay don't really have a speech delay. Okay. So we're talking about children who cannot answer questions correctly, speak in short sentences or just single words or even no words. Those we would call actually a language delay. Where a speech delay is there's something wrong with the pronunciation, and you need to find a certified or legitimate speech therapist to check out what sounds are missing, if it's actually a delay or a disorder, so on and so forth. So I'm not going to go into too much detail. Just go and do an assessment. All right. You might ask, so what's a late talker? And I want to draw your attention to another resource called Hannon Center. It's really a really great online platform and resource for parents who have children who are kind of late talking. Correct. According to the Hannon Center, a late talker is a toddler between 18 to 30 months who has a good understanding of language, typically developing play skills, motor skills, thinking skills, and social skills, but has limited spoken vocabulary. Vocabulary for his or her language. The difficulty of late talking children have is specifically with spoken or expressive language. The group of children can be very puzzling because they have all the building blocks for spoken language, yet they don't talk or talk very little. So what that means is late talkers have a problem expressing themselves using spoken language. Right. As a speech therapist, we see it, and we might call it just expressive language delay. Whereas in language, there's two parts, just to let you know. There's expressive and receptive. Expressive meaning how much you can talk, how much you can use the spoken language. The other part is receptive. And what that means is how much a child can listen, how much a child can understand the spoken language coming through their ears. So actually, this is just listening and comprehension. To sum this up, speech delay is a misused term if your child is having pronunciation issues, having difficulty making the sound. So then that would be a speech issue, and your child might have a speech delay. So seek professional advice and go do an assessment. It usually just takes an hour. It's very easy to check whether your child has a speech or language or both problems. Okay, so if your child is actually having problems communicating, it might be a mixture of speech and language problems. And my advice is actually just to seek for professional advice. There are just so many videos you can watch on the Internet like this one you are watching right now. And it means that you are actually seeking for opinion and advice. So go out and seek for professional opinion where a professional can actually sit down and take a look at your child in real life. And it really comes down to risk management. Because whether your child is just a late talker, or he or she might have a speech impediment, a disorder, a delay, language delay, so on and so forth, it's better to know early so that you know what you're dealing with. Find out early. It's better to be safe than to be sorry. And that's the end of this video. Thank you for watching the entirety of this video. Before we go, I wanna send you a gift from me. And what this is is a checklist for you to start training and therapy at home for your delayed child. You can go to www.agentsofspeech.com checklist. The link is also in the description box below. If you have any questions, anything that you want me to cover as a therapist, put them in the comment section so that I know ask any questions there. I'll make a video. And so that people around the world can actually find more information online. Because right now it's very hard to seek for professional advice. At the time of recording, we're still quarantined. So with that said, thank you very much for checking out again and I'll see you next week. Bye.
