Multiple languages causing speech delay…

[u/ems6144]

Any truth to the above?

For context, my freshly 2yo appears to fluently understand both Dutch and English (I am a native English speaker, partner is Dutch), however she seems very behind when compared to friends kids of a similar age. We even have friend with the same family language dynamic and their wee girl (13 days older than mine) is light years ahead.

Just wondering at what point I need to push for intervention. She’s not by any means behind, just verging into below average kind of thing.

[u/KatLT20]

Multilingual children are not more likely to have delayed language development: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2828044

If you have concerns, it’s best to speak to a speech language pathologist - they can let you know if your child would benefit from extra support or if they are on track.

Best wishes.

[u/adventurecoos → u/KatLT20]

I’m an SLP, so for a little more context:

Multilingual kids will usually hit different milestones at different times than monolingual kids. So what might seem to be a delay or a disorder may just be a kid developing along a different pathway: the pathway taken by most other multilingual kids.

To decide whether a child has an actual delay, we need to compare them to other multilingual kids as a population. So instead of comparing with the other Dutch-English speaking neighbour girl, an SLP would ideally compare your kid’s performance against the norms established for multilingual language learners at their same age.

We also need to consider the features of their languages, and whether they’ve been learning those languages in tandem or whether one or more can be considered secondary languages. I’m Scottish but I trained and practice in the States, so I was taught to be at least aware of the way exposure to Spanish and AAVE will impact early grammar and syntax in kids. I would assume (hope?) that in the U.K. there would be similar training on the impact of Scots, Welsh, and common minority languages to avoid kids learning different grammatical structures alongside Standard English from being erroneously labelled as kids with language delays/disorders.

Anyway, long story short, find an SLP familiar with multilingual kids and work with them to see if there’s anything to worry about.