I remember getting the BabyCenter email with link to speech milestones a few weeks ago, looking at it, and thinking, “yeah, whatever.”
I think there is a wide range, and it depends a lot on the home environment, how parents interact with the child, and the child’s personality/interests.
DS is 16 months now, but we stopped counting a long time ago. First words were shortly before 12 months. By 13 months, there were at least 20. At this point, DS can repeat most sounds, so I can ask him to say “ah”, and he’ll try to repeat (some sounds are more successful than others). He has at least 30 words that he says frequently (multiple times in a day) on his own initiative. They center around animals (many are animal sounds, that he uses to identify animals), vehicles, and food and also include things like mama/papa, bye-bye, good night, wet, cold/hot, moon, star, egg, bath, bubble, circle, blue, wow, uh-oh, ow. There’s another set of words that he will use to answer us with, if we ask him a question, but he doesn’t initiate those words on his own, like bathroom/pee/poo (Do you need to pee now? Do you want to go to the bathroom?). They also include harder to pronounce words like squirrel.
His vocabulary (words that he understands), though, is much greater than that. I’d put it at around 200 words. He knows most of the 100 words and 100 animals books that we have. He will spend hours asking us to do books with him. Most of the books are vocabulary books (pictures of objects). He’s clearly trying to learn vocabulary. When doing books or various apps, we often do them in “where is x?” mode and he points out the object. That’s how we know what he understands. We also do emotion and action flashcards (as well as other topics) through the free Bitsboard app (using iPad). He understands most of those as well, but doesn’t say any of the words yet.
He can definitely pick up several new words in a day, if given the opportunity (exposure to new things that he finds interesting). At this point, he’s being slowed down by his parents, who don’t have the time to bring in new stuff, so we mostly repeat using things we have used with him before.
As far as EL goes, I think we do very little compared to most people here. We did Little Reader for a few months, then summer vacation rolled around and then daycare started, and we never got back into it again. I’ve tried the last few weeks to do Little Reader again, a few times a week. We don’t own/watch any DVDs. We have a small collection of books, maybe around 20 now (only 8 or so get used regularly), plus 3 sets of baby words board books (2 sets of 10 books (Green Start Book Towers - I’m not wild about these) and 1 set of 6 books (Chinese/English collection - good if you ignore the occasional mistranslated English)). I think what Little Reader did for DS was to teach him that a word represents a concept that can have many incarnations (real-life picture, cartoon representation, sound, etc). Since he understands that words represents things or concepts (wet/cold/wow), he wants to learn words. He’s pretty self-motivated to learn.
On the other hand, my niece at 21 months had about 3 spoken words. I don’t think there is any EL and not much interest in books in that household. So, there is quite a range. When we went to visit (DS was 14 months at the time/niece was 21 months), I asked to go to the zoo. We did go, and afterwards, my brother/wife commented that they didn’t understand why I wanted to go to the zoo, but understood once we were there, since DS knew so many animals. I did not realize until I was at the zoo that it was not the best suggestion for my niece, since she didn’t know any animals. So, I think what kids are exposed to at home makes a bit of difference.
I also think things might have been different if DS had been in daycare earlier. I don’t think his daycare does much to stimulate vocabulary learning, but it does allow him the opportunity to play with a wide variety of toys (good, since we live in a small house and refuse to buy most toys). Although they read books in daycare, they don’t do it in the same way that we do at home. Some of their book reading is waving the picture book at the kids while listening to a CD sing the book. It’s probably fun, but doesn’t provide the same kind of educational experience.
So, I think many of the cited references are probably true for a large number of kids, but probably also low for a large number of kids that grow up in richer learning environments, and that the personality of the child (whether the child wants to vocalize or not) and how parents respond and encourage a child to talk play a role as well. I’ve read a number of “encourage your kids to talk” books (recently, after the fact) and found that I was already doing many of the suggestions (like make reading a book a “fill in the word” experience). I think things like that really help, but not everyone knows to do that.
