Understanding toddler speak

Communicating
Within six months after their first birthday, children have about a dozen words in their speaking vocabulary. Almost all of them name the people or things that interest them -- parents, pets, and their own body parts. They rarely name things that don't move or that aren't used in a game. The number of their spoken words increases slowly up to about eighteen months. At that age, a toddler might still have only twenty words, but he has begun to include some one-word sentences like Go, Eat, Bad, Up, and the all-purpose command, This. But the favourite one-word exclamations are Mine! and No, the most powerful of all. Toddlers seem to enjoy the power of saying No! and delight in trying it out on long-suffering parents.

At this point, children experiment with language, trying out new names or sounds. They might invent their own words for things -- Boo might be a favourite teddy bear. They might repeat words but apply them to the wrong objects, just as a tourist might pick a word out of a travel dictionary and use it in the hope that it suits the situation.

Replacing hard sounds
The clarity of their words starts to improve, but don't expect too much of your child's pronunciation. Some sounds like bah and da are easy to make, but others require a considerable amount of skill. To make the sound l, for example, you have to put the tip of your tongue on the roof of your mouth, just behind the teeth. For young toddlers, that's still too difficult. They use other sounds instead, typically w, m, or y, so lunch could come out as yunch. Toddlers have similar problems with the sound of r. They cannot make hard consonants like t and g at the beginnings of words, so they simply substitute other ones that are easier to make -- too comes out as doo and goose as doose.

Some consonant combinations, like thr or str, are tough, too, especially at the beginning of words, so toddlers use a different one altogether -- and stream comes out as deem. Consonants also give trouble at the ends of words, so young speakers simply leave them off, as in bai for bike or muh for more.

Constructive correction
Trying to correct a child's pronunciation, however, can discourage him from trying, if he learns that his cheerful chatter always meets with a language lesson. The best approach at this age, and through a child's first years, is to model the correct way. If your toddler wants an apple and says appo, respond by saying, "You want an apple? Let's go get an apple." This tells your child you understood her, but also models the right way to say it. Don't hold back the apple and make the child say it "the right way." Your child may just withdraw and be less keen to speak the next time.