Telegraphic Speech in a 21 Months Old
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It’s between 18 to 24 months that yet another speech development milestone in toddlers takes centre-stage. So, get ready to be surprised! Your baby will start making two-word sentences aided by telegraphic speech like ‘That ball’, ‘Round ball’, ‘See Daddy’ and ‘More Cookie.’ Are you already smiling?
Now that your child is about to turn 2, and has already started responding to phonemes(speech sounds made in your native lingo), you can expect her to start putting together two-word sentences. Armed with 50 words or more, this new level of language acquisition will remind you of telegrams in decades gone by! They had no conjunctions, articles or unnecessary words to save the money of senders back then. Your toddler is also set to omit grammatical morphemes and add nouns and verbs together to tell you what she wants or means.
Determining What Is Telegraphic Speech In Toddlers
Telegraphic speech refers to an essential process for developing language skills. Between the age of 18-24 months, tots learn to frame two-three word sentences that are referred to as telegraphic speech. Parents use telegraphic speech in order to communicate with their children, and help them speak faster with repetitively used words.
Examples of Telegraphic Speech In 21-Month-Old Toddlers
At 21 months, a toddler is able to interact verbally to make her needs met. Here are some of the common examples children speak and understand:
- You going ‘bye-bye’ in the car?
- ‘Red shoe?’
- ‘Mommy go/ Daddy go’
- ‘Eat apple’
- ‘More candy!’
How Many Words Should A 21-Month-Old Say?
There are a lot of words that a 21-month-old can speak. But then, there are also cases when children don’t speak up to 3 years of age. Toddlers in the age of 18-21 months usually utter about 35-40 words. Many children can also count numbers till 10. In general, the graph for language development in toddlers points towards small and broken sentences of 2-3 words that convey what they want, albeit briefly.
Milestone of Speech Development
Telegraphic speech serves as the beginning for small sentence construction for toddlers. As and when babies grow, they start diagnosing different sounds and sorting out speech sounds that include words belonging to the vocabulary of their mother tongue. This is where parents’ role in child language development comes in. It helps them follow simple commands, point out colours and pictures when named, and start naming a few body parts like eyes, nose and ears.
Role of Parents
Children learn speech sounds by listening to the people around them. Every time parents speak to their toddlers, they are modelling language and a rule system that makes up that language. So, as a mom raising a 21-month-old child, you need to learn how to adjust your sentences to fit your little one’s limited vocabulary. This is known as motherless. Use small sentences marked with redundancy and repetition of words. Gradually, you can start introducing complex words, short sentences and phonetics, along with encouraging language growth by repeating the same words in longer sentences.
Go ahead and help your child form sentences and learn new words with telegraphic speech. You’ll love the chatter that follows!
