Using my own vocabulary before starting to speak

Post Reply New Topic

Did anybody else use their own vocabulary before starting to speak? For example, I assigned a different word or each of my family members, which didn't resemble any real-life vocabulary at all. This phase was between 2 and 2 1/3 years old. I didn't use any real-life vocabulary before that. I started talking after I turned 2 1/3 years old, though.

Don't remember doing that, but I suspect a lot of babies and toddlers do.

I've always considered (and a most parents I know do), the babbling that infants and toddlers do is actually speech, that they probably understand, but we don't. They just haven't learned yet to articulate speech of adults and kids around them yet. It's part of learning to speak, and I think perfectly normal.

I do remember watching my kids go through it, and at some point beginning to understand them all long before anyone else could. That's normal too, for parents to understand what others hear as their kid's babbling.

One of my kids, the one who is most Aspie, was speaking very early (complete sentences before eight months), but he wasn't clear enough for others to understand him until around four and a half years. The leap he took from what others heard as babbling (but that we understood), to very precise articulation only took a matter of a few months.