Possible weird first words

[Dawnb1183]

Is my child different? So she is 2 years and 2 months and with her speech it's like her first words seem to be more about trying to form a sentence, other that the normal mum, dad she says things like, "what's this, what's that, over there, I don't know, oh no, oh dear, what's wrong, another one, bye bye" but trying to get her to say individual things/items like cat, dog, ball, etc is like trying to pull teeth from her. Is this normal for her speech?

It’s not weird.
She could be a Gestalt language processing child. Where they learn in sentences/phrases rather than single words. Repeating on the phases and the intonation can be something called echolalia.

If you have any worries, like certain milestones not being met, just chat with your health visitor.

Sounds pretty normal to me. She's repeating what she hears you say probably?

Speech and language therapist here. I have two baby grandchildren (11 months and 19 months) and just spend hours observing them. I love the various markers of early language development. So much is going on, first words do not emerge out of the context of the rest of development.

Children do progress differently. I did think about her being a Gestalt processor, but that is not the point of my post. It may also be that she hears you trying too hard and is repeating that - you really should avoid asking “what’s that?”, counter intuitive I know but avoiding asking questions is one of the first pieces of advice we give.

Then I would seek the opinion of your health visitor.

It makes sense now. I will avoid asking questions and focus more on what she is doing, looking at etc and see if it makes a difference over the next month. If no different I will give the health visitor a call. I have also read this afternoon about gestalt processing which may also be the case. Thank you for the advice

I think it's normal. My son was similar. Definitely not a gestalt language learner either, quite the opposite: he almost never copied words or phrases. All his language was very deliberately used to say something or ask for something.

His first kind of verbal communication was pointing at stuff he wanted to see and going "Da! Da!" until we showed it to him. And he was keen to show us stuff too. So he'd look out the window and point at vehicles and say "Bus. Another one bus. Car. Taxi!" And so on. But you couldn't point at a picture of a bus (or a car or a dog) and say "What's that?" and get an answer. He'd just look at you like it was a stupid question.

When he put words together it was all spontaneous stuff too. I remember him wanting to tell my mum about going on a plane when he was about 20 months and saying something like "Plane fly up up sky! High!" Accompanied by whooshing his hand up into the air. But trying to do the Health visitor activities about "If you say a two word phrase to your child, will they repeat it back to you?" was a complete non-starter.

I would say from my experience with my youngest, that this could point to her being a gestalt language processor (was just called echolalia in my son’s day). If language development is not typical then I would definitely keep a close watch and have a chat with your health visitor.

Apparently I said nothing until out with my dad one day and then randomly said “shop sells cars” and then refused to speak again for 6 months so mum didn’t believe him
I’m fine now!