Positive signs that speech is coming?

[Nosleepforthismum]

26 month old DS. Speech delayed and been working with a speech therapist for a few months now. After only saying 4 words for ages (banana, bye bye, more and no) out of nowhere, for the past two days we have had mummy, daddy, hungry, please, yeah, crumpet, thanks, baby, gentle and even a two word sentence of bye bye water (bath plug being pulled). I don’t know why but I just thought I’d never hear him actually start to speak properly so I feel a little overwhelmed! Has anyone else had kids with basically no speech and then it seemed to all come at once?

No, but just wanted to say Wow! What a fantastic things to have happened for you both. Keep this list of words safe. He sounds lovely!

Hopefully someone will be along soon with wiser words/more direct experience for you.

Coming here for my own reassurance as opposed to with any, sorry OP and hope you don't mind...

These new words your DS has begun to say, how clear are they? Are they approximations or would they be undeniably obvious if a stranger heard them?

Context of the question is I'm concerned my DD is delayed, she repeats quite a few words when she hears them but they are approximations, and she won't use them without hearing them first. There have been a lot more of these occur in the last month or so but like you, I'm unsure if they're as progressive as I hope 😔

Oh no, that’s fine. I understand the worry about your child’s development. I’m right here with you!

So, we’ve had dada for a while and loads of babbling but never mama. This is the first time he’s tried to say mummy and it’s exaggerated “muh-meee” but even over the last two days with loads of praise he’s got more confident and the word is coming easier. Same with daddy although he’s still slipping back into dada as I think he finds it easier. These are definitely recognisable words and used in the correct context.

We’ve been working on “yeah” for ages by asking a question and then saying yeah after it. Speech therapist has told us to pause after the question now. So tonight it was “shall we go for a bath” and he ran to the gate as usual but instead of saying “yeah” for him and opening the gate, I paused and asked the question again and he said yeah. Tested it in the bath and asked “are you ready to come out” and he said yeah straight away.

“Hungry” was probably unrecognisable to anyone else but I was most proud of this because I’d been trying to teach him the sign for hungry and he came up to me, unprompted, and did the sign and said (an attempt at) the word.

Some of the others were said with prompts (which he’s never done before) like please and thanks. Definitely not clear but I’ll take the small wins!

All the others are attempts and definitely not clear. He does attempt the two syllable words though so he doesn’t shorten them like “ba” for bottle (if that’s what you mean)

Flower is “Fow-wer”, bubbles is “Bubbah” for example.

How old is your DD? My speech therapist has said to me that they are more concerned about understanding at 2 than amount of words spoken. I personally think it’s a great thing she’s repeating words back to you when you say them. I like to think my DS does the same (only silently) ready to use them in context when they feel confident enough to do so.

Wow, thank you so much for such a detailed response! I had no exposure to young children prior to DD so although I know language is a very gradual thing (like motor skills), I didn't know if some children went from almost nothing to very articulate, relatively speaking, or whether they all went through a phase of only a select few people being able to understand them at first.

DD is 21 months, so still time I know, but until the last month she said pretty much nothing but "dada" (not actually meaning daddy, although he got called that too, but calling everything dada). Like your DS I've never heard anything that even resembles mama/mummy. She's suddenly started saying "up" (sounding more like "ap") and "down" ("da-hn"), which she does say herself when she's either going up or down. And then pretty much all of her other words aren't very clear, and she only repeats them rather than using them in a context. I'd say she maybe has 10-15 words including animal noises, maybe 20 if you include signs? She babbles a lot but there's a lot of sounds/letters I never really hear her make, and we're no where near combining 2 words yet..

Her understanding is and always has been phenomenal though. I feel like everyone says that but she's been able to follow 2 or 3 step instructions ("go into your room and get xxx and bring it back to mummy") since she was around 12 months.

I did a lot of reading about speech tips when DD was a newborn so I've always tried to implement these throughout her life hoping to help with her language development and feel like we're more behind than a lot.

My DD only had a handful of words at 2. Started using 2 words together out of nowhere at 25 months, was using full sentences by 2.5. Now at 3.5 you’d never had known - her teachers at nursery are so impressed by her speech they couldn’t believe she was barely speaking at 2. Have faith, sounds like it’s coming 😊