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Late
Talkers
By Susan F G
Among the
most exciting moments in parenting has to be a child's first
real words -- that "mama" or "dada" or
"juice" that often gets dutifully recorded in the
baby book. The age at which children begin using language
ranges widely, and anxious parents of late talkers often are
told not to worry. But findings from a long- running study
show that children who are slow to begin talking often continue
to have weakness in language-related skills for years, even
if they seem to catch up with their peers by the time they
enter school.
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Late talkers may subtly lag in vocabulary, grammar,
reading and spelling as they progress through school, says Bryn
Mawr College psychologist Leslie Rescorla, the study's author.
Her research suggests that delayed talking may indicate a general
language weakness that stays with children. She defines late
talkers as children who say fewer than 50 words or have no two-word
phrases by age 2. She has been following a group of them --
34 children from the Philadelphia suburbs -- for nearly 15 years.
They are tested at various intervals and compared against a
group of children from similar middle-class backgrounds who
had normal language skills as toddlers. She has published preliminary
results up to age 13.
As a group, the late talkers scored lower in language skills
than the other children, she said, although they were still
within the average range on most language and academic tasks.
Even though they look normal, late talkers tend to have a "lingering
kind of mild inferiority" in language- related skills.
Rescorla's study on late talkers is part of a bigger field of
research into the complexities of language acquisition. While
children start talking at varying ages -- they unusually make
their first words around 1 year to 18 months -- 2 is considered
the age at which most children have enough grasp of language
to communicate. The typical 2-year-old has a vocabulary of more
than 150 words, and it expands rapidly from there.
But for some children, talking is slow to begin. Karen says
her daughter, Lauren, was past her second birthday and still
not doing much more than pointing and making sounds when she
wanted to communicate. "This was my first child, so I didn't
have a lot to go on," Karen says. When Lauren's talking
hadn't improved much by age 3, her mother took her for an evaluation.
"She was a year behind," Karen says, so she started
Lauren in language and speech therapy. A year back, Karen’s
pediatrician told her “Don’t worry, Lauren is alright”.
Rescorla, chairman of the Psychology Department at Bryn Mawr
and director of the school's Child Study Institute, says the
"don't worry" approach is not unusual when it comes
to late talkers, especially when the child appears to be on
target for other developmental milestones. She doesn't think
parents of an otherwise normal child should hit the panic button
if there isn't much vocabulary by age 2. If there's little progress
by 30 months, she thinks an evaluation is a good idea. Pediatricians
should be able to steer parents to appropriate local services,
such as speech and language pathologists or early- intervention
programs. "Children may be slow to talk for a variety of
reasons," she says. One goal of an evaluation is to determine
whether it is part of a bigger problem.
Mental retardation, hearing impairment, and autism and related
disorders need to be ruled out first. The next question is whether
a child has an "expressive" language delay (can she
make words and sentences to communicate ideas?) or a "receptive"
language problem (does he understand the words and sentences
that he hears?). Some children have both. Others may have good
language skills but difficulty with enunciation -- their words
aren't clear. Speech therapy can help.
Rescorla's ongoing study of late talkers involves children whose
language problem was expressive; they were developmentally normal
in other ways. While the late talkers and the comparison group
had similar reading skills around ages 6 and 7 -- when they
were all learning to read -- significant differences soon started
to emerge. In the update published recently, she reported that
at ages 8 and 9, the 34 late talkers scored lower on most language-related
measures, including reading, listening comprehension, grammar
and vocabulary. At age 13, an analysis of 22 of the late talkers
found they were still behind their peers in grammar, vocabulary,
verbal memory, reading and, to some degree, spelling. Recalling
sentences, for instance, was more difficult for late talkers.
Diane Paul-Brown, speech-language director at the American Speech-Language-Hearing
Association, which publishes the journal that reported Rescorla's
work, says the results provided a "new understanding of
late-talking children and show the persistence of language problems."
She says the research pointed to the importance of early intervention
as opposed to a wait- and-see attitude.
Most of Rescorla's late talkers are now 17, and she is wrapping
up her research on the group. She has yet to analyze the final
findings. She says parents of children with delayed talking
"should be fairly confident that their kids are going to
be generally all right. But it will manifest itself as mild
weaknesses in some areas." |
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