19 month old speech - is she behind?

[peachypal2018]

Asking for advice/reassurance

My daughter is 19 1/2 months, and I’m worried her speech is “less than expected”

For context her older brother is 5yo, non verbal and autistic so I’m obviously glad she’s made more progress than he has, but still worried and looking for signs for a speech delay in her as well, he doesn’t interact with her and never has so worried she is missing out on peer socialisation outside of nursery 3 days a week.

Her understanding is fantastic, appears to understand most of what is said to her and follows most instructions without hesitation.

Here are her current words, and her understanding of them:

• “Mama” (points at me/pictures of me, can point to my body parts when labelled as mine, ie she knows I mean my eyes not hers if I say mama’s eyes)
• “Dada” (same as above)
• her brothers name (same as above)
• her own name (recognises herself in the mirror/photos, can find her own body parts, but also points at other babies and calls them her name)
• Knows lots of animals, likes pointing at them for me to label over and over, but mostly she uses their sound when talking herself - “woof woof” for dogs etc
• “Yeah” and “no” (uses properly, and nods and shakes head)
• “Peppa” (favourite teddy, will ask for her by name)
• “Diddy” (dummy, will ask for it)
• Others used in context / pointed at: “flower”, “star”, “bubbles”, “cheese”, “spoon”, “uh oh”
• Waves hello/bye and signs “all done” after eating but doesn’t say them

Everything else is just grunts/unrecognisable, is this normal or an I’m just panicking over nothing?

Thank you!

How does she score on this progress checker and the ASQ?

https://progress-checker.speechandlanguage.org.uk/

Never seen this before! - it says:

Thanks for using our progress checker.From your answers, it may be that your child needs more support with attention and listening, talking, social communication.

No indication of what answers have given it that though - and I felt I put yes to quite a lot!

I think there's a free helpline you can contact to discuss for advice. I'm sorry if it's caused anxiety. Your health visitor might also be able to advise.

If it's any reassurance, children develop different skills at different rates and can have periods where one skill is developing rapidly and others are much slower. Just from what you said in your initial post, I wouldn't have thought she'd be outside the wide range of what can be normal at that age group. What are her other skills like?

Fine - really good at matching shapes in puzzles, can recognise most animals, physically walking fine, claps, waves, can do “head shoulders knees and toes” dance with help and she also initiates “row row row your boat” by climbing onto my knee and rocking whilst saying “row”

Scirocco has given a good suggestion of contacting Speech & Language UK and discussing the results of the progress checker with them.

As her DB has ASD I'd contact the GV and ask for a referral for her to SLT and for a hearing test.

I'd also fill in the 20 month Ages & Stages and the 18 month Social & Emotional Ages & Stages. Getting the HV to score both together will give her a clearer picture of any support your DD may need

Her understanding sounds great, and in terms of number of words, I think she's doing very well – on the higher end of the typical range, actually. That said, obviously the progress checker picked up something.

That said, I find the Speech and Language UK progress checker tends to say you should contact them if you have even one 'no' or 'not sure' answer, so I think it's quite a cautious questionnaire. That's not necessarily a bad thing – it will help identify any child with even a hint of a possible problem – but as part of that, it will also identify a lot of children who don't need any extra support.

For better or worse, the ASQ is more middle of the road (that's how they were designed) and never expects 6 out of 6 yeses to reach 'development appears on track'. The scoring sheet is at the back. Quite a lot of children will have one or two areas scoring 'in the grey' and usually that would just mean watchful waiting (but perhaps with your family history, they'd refer on). More serious delays will show up as black, or lots of grey areas.

Here is a version of the ASQ-SE that includes the scoring for that one: https://www.socfc.org/SOHS/Disabilities%20Mental%20Health/ASQ/ASQ%20SE%2018%20Months.pdf Again, with the family history, they might refer a borderline score.

It sounds good to me....also don't they often have a word explosion. ....as in it's not linear but will suddenly start speaking a lot more in a short space of time. My daughter is 17 months, she started walking properly a couple of months ago and her speech stalled while she concentrated on that. But now that the walking is more automatic she is suddenly saying more words. Not as many words as your baby though.

I’m really hoping for an explosion! As I say her understanding is good and compared to her brother I’ve tried to be relatively chill about it cos she’s hit all milestones so far whereas by this point with him it was like he froze in time from about 15 months and stayed like that until 3/4, I think she’s actually overtaken him in some ways. It’s so hard isn’t it, want to be chill but so anxious as well!

The waiting is very hard especially when you already have a child with needs. To me she sounds good and it sounds like she's really engaging with you and trying to communicate in an interactive way with gestures etc. I'm in Ireland so it might be different here but I think if there's a child with needs already in the family the public health nurse would be fairly responsive to queries or requests for reassurance.....waiting lists are long for speech therapy so in your situation they might just put her name on the wait list just in case. And fingers crossed the words will keep coming and you'll never have to go for speech therapy!