speech and lannguage in 3.5 year old? what should I expect?

[VictorVictoria]

DS 3.5 was at the slower end of normal to speak (first words around 18 months) but has always understood everything we have said to him, complicated commands etc. As far as I can assess from looking online, he has hit all the speech and language milestones (3 word sentences before 3 etc). Now at 3.5 (july birthday) he is capabale of talking in pretty long sentences and is starting to tell me when things hurt, when he bumped his head etc and asks lots of where, what's that, who is that questions. Nursery seem to have no issues about his speech. But I have noticed that he is very patchy- when he is tired or feels under pressure he either doesnt want to speak or his speech can be very garbled. Still mixes up he/she and you/I occasionally. and the rest of his speech can be grammatically perfect or atrocious. and absolutely no why questions or understanding of the concept why. Good at colurs/numbers/letters/describing things which happen in books etc. More patchy on telling me what he has done that day. In fact says very little about nursery other than that he played with aeroplanes...

He has always been a lateish althpugh within the normal range developer with everything.

your son is amonth older than mine. Ds has aDx'd speech delay and is just putting 3 words together when he feels like it!
My daughter, now 7, was very similar to your son - just not a great 'chatterbox' she STILL doesn't tell me anything about her school day, time out, parties etc unless prompted.
I don't think you have anything to worry about, but as my son is behind, perhaps Moondog will be along to re-assure you!

I think that sounds normal. My DS often tells me on the way out of the nursery door that he hasnt even been to nursery that day !!!

The other day I asked him why he wanted something and he thought long and hard before grinning and saying... "oh mummy, im in a why muddle".

Other times his eloquence astounds me, he uses words like marvelous, atrocious, unexpected etc.

Sounds the same as my DS who is also a July 2005 baby! He has lots of words so I am not concerned with his vocabulary but his pronounciation has a way to go yet. When I ask him what he has done at nursery his standard asnswer is "played cars"

My dd has moderate speech delay but advance language skills (according to her assessment). She says very complex & imaginative stuff but there are several letter sounds she can't say and often in words misses of endings, subsitutes constenant sounds at the beginning, middle & end of words. If she is speaking out of context I can struggle to understand what she is saying to me, similar issues at pre-school most of the time they can work it out but sometimes are stumped! She can't say "yes" neither the y or s sound on their own

bump............

Victorvittoria, Mine is way behind yours at 3.3 because he has receptive language delay too.

But I think I may be able to reassure you about telling you what happened at nursery. Our nursery teacher told me that they don't expect a genuine understanding and ability to report the past until children are in reception. She told me not to be fooled by the appparent fluency of the other kids in relation to this. It may be that the others say a lot about the past but their understanding of it is no greater than your son's.

If anyone can come along and link us to a guide to what children should be able to understand conceptually at this stage I'd be very grateful. Mine can do 3-word sentences but why? is completely beyond him - it's not even on my target list.

Your little boy sounds completely average, some of his reluctance to speak under pressure could be his personality (one of mine was def lacking in confidence in case she had misundertood/heard and was very quiet).

Using the wrong person/tense etc - by 5 & 6 year olds still make funny mistakes like that when they're tired.

If the nursery has no concerns I really don't think there is any? My dd with moderate delay is being worked on by the nursery she is very clearly behind her peers, well apart from the others with speech problems!

I just I had from dd

"I wan de tor"

"I want the torch" zero attempt to put sounds on the end of want & torch - this is very typical of every sentence she says. 30 minute melt down because we couldn't understand she wanted the "rapunzal" doll because she was say "raooah" or something like that!