If your child is dealing with a speech delay, you are not alone. A staggering 15-20% of 2 year olds has been diagnosed with a speech or language delay. It will be helpful to know that, in most cases, with a little practice, you and your child will be quickly on your way to fluent communication.

In the same way that food provides us with the necessary building blocks for our bodies, language input in the environment (e.g. caregivers talking to their children) provides the building blocks for our neural language systems. Therefore, adequate language nutrition for our kids is necessary to build their language "bodies.”

The first step is to realize that we are putting our children at risk for cognitive and developmental delays. The second is to name any unhelpful strategies we are using to offset our cognitive dissonance (e.g. modifying, trivializing, etc.). The third step is to understand that we have the power and choice to change our behaviors — even if we take small steps

So what does it actually take to learn language? Like I mentioned before, the constructivist model of language acquisition posits that we use a ’Swiss army knife’ (Tomasello, 2016) of cognitive capacities including pattern recognition, memory, attention, categorization, reading of communicative intentions, and analogy making. Indeed, the task of acquiring language seems so monumental as to be almost magical, but it is simply the result of the brain’s amazing ability to think, process, and reason.