twin speech disparity

Hi all,
I have boy-girl twins that are almost 18 months. Our son talks a lot and our daughter does not. I haven't added up their words but I'm guessing our son knows close to 50 and can put together 2-word sentences (e.g. all done, cook pasta, ball down) while our daughter knows maybe 10. Both seem to understand what we say and our daughter also has a few signs so I am not overly worried. But I've noticed that sometimes our son will answer for our daughter (like when we read a book and I ask her a question I know she knows). I don't want to dampen our son's enthusiasm, but I'm wondering if I should be doing anything special to encourage our daughter and support her language skills. Or perhaps I should not worry at all and she'll talk when she's ready. Any advice would be welcome....

 

Could you try one on one time with your girl and see if this helps ? I sounds to me like you son is advance and you daughter is doing fine...my girls are 20 months and can only say single words, I am not worried as they are saying more at this age than my older son was.

 

I was going to suggest 1:1 time, too. I have a very chatty boy like yours and a quieter boy who sometimes worries me. I find when I get him alone he opens up and is much more talkative. Tonight for instance, he was talking about one of our toys and said 'helmet'. My dh was floored- he had no idea Orion knew that word. We probably wouldn't have heard it except Sebastian was throwing a fit in his room.

 

10 words used meaningfully at 18 months is fine - especially if language understanding seems normal. Most kids develop two word phrases between 18 and 24 months, so your son is at the more advanced end of the language spectrum. Things can change so fast at this age. My b/g twins have leap frogged each other in language. My boy started out with many more vocabulary words, and I recall being a little worried about my girl when she only had about 5 words at 15 months. Well now at 22 months, she actually talks MORE than him - much larger vocab and more two word phrases.

 

I agree it sounds like she is fine, just not at his level. One on one time is always good if you can manage it at all, even once a week would be useful. When asking questions if he jumps in and answers for her I would just ask her again so she gets the chance to answer too. (If they were older I'd say stop him answering but they're a little young to really understand.) Make sure you use their name with the question so they know who you're asking and it might help to ask him a question first and then ask her one straight away after, if you keep doing that back and forth they should eventually get the idea of taking turns to answer.