Ghinwa Salem Speech Therapy
Speech & Language Conditions

Speech Delay in Toddlers: Assessment & Therapy in Beirut

Your child is two and still mostly pointing. Or three, and only you can understand them. Speech and language delay is the most common reason families come to the clinic in Verdun — and the one where acting early makes the biggest difference. Here is how to tell the difference between a late bloomer and a child who needs help.

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Signs a parent notices first

  • Fewer than 10 words at 18 months, counting all languages together
  • Fewer than 50 words, or no two-word phrases ("more juice", "baba go"), by age 2
  • Understands much less than other children their age — instructions need gestures to land
  • Points, pulls and grunts instead of using words they seem to know
  • Stopped using words they used to say
  • At 3, strangers understand less than half of what they say
  • Frustration or tantrums when they can't get a message across
  • Very little babbling as a baby, or few gestures like waving and pointing by 12 months

Wait, or book?

Some late talkers catch up on their own — but there is no reliable way to tell which ones from the outside, and the ones who don't lose the most valuable years for intervention. The rule is simple: if your child is under 50 words at two, isn't combining words by two and a half, or you are worried about how much they understand, book an assessment. "Wait until three" is advice that costs a year. An assessment is not a commitment to therapy; often it ends with a plan you can run at home.

What therapy looks like

For toddlers, sessions are play — and you are in the room. The evidence for late talkers is strongest for parent-coached approaches: Ghinwa models specific techniques during play, you practise them, and the child gets hundreds of good language opportunities a week instead of one hour. For older children, therapy targets the exact gaps the assessment found — vocabulary, sentence building, understanding questions, following instructions — with home activities after every session.

Arabic, English, French — and one child

Bilingualism does not cause speech delay, and dropping a language will not fix one. In a Lebanese home a child's vocabulary has to be counted across every language they hear: twenty Arabic words plus fifteen English ones is thirty-five words, not twenty. Mixing languages in one sentence is normal and expected. Assessment at the clinic is done in the languages your child actually speaks, so a French-schooled child who speaks Arabic at home is not scored as delayed in a language they are only just meeting.

Questions parents ask

A family history of late talking is real, and it does raise the odds of a child being a late bloomer. But it also raises the odds of a persistent language difficulty — the same family history cuts both ways. It is a reason to assess sooner, not a reason to wait. An assessment tells you which of the two you are looking at.

Good comprehension is genuinely reassuring — children who understand well but speak late have the best odds of catching up. It is still worth checking two things: that comprehension is as strong as it looks (children are excellent at reading routines and gestures), and that there is no reason for the gap, such as a speech sound difficulty or a hearing issue. A hearing test is often the first step.

Screens do not cause language disorder, but heavy screen use in the first two years displaces the back-and-forth conversation that language grows from, and the research links it to later talking. Reducing screens and increasing face-to-face play helps every child — but if the words still don't come, that alone is not treatment.Screen time and speech delay: what the research says

From around 18 months. Before that, concerns are usually about hearing, babbling and gestures, and a paediatrician and audiologist are the right first calls. From 18 months a speech-language assessment can tell you whether a child is on track and give you specific things to do at home.
Late talker or language disorder? How to tell the differenceFAQ

Other conditions

StutteringSpeech sound disordersAutism & communicationSocial communicationAll services

Not sure if this is your child?

Send a WhatsApp message with your child's age and what you have noticed. You will get a straight answer about whether an assessment makes sense — and if it doesn't, you will be told that too.

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