Albert Einstein didn’t speak until he was around three-years-old.
This often-repeated bit of trivia has consoled the parents of many late talkers, the clear implication being that the potential of a late speaker isn’t necessarily any less than that of one who speaks earlier.

Whether this conclusion – based on a sample of just one extraordinary individual – is true remains to be seen. Much of the research on the issue hasn’t followed enough children over enough years to be able to offer a verdict.

A recent attempt to shed more light on speech developmend comes from US researcher Mabel Rice of the University of Kansas and colleagues at Curtin University in Australia. They compared 128 Australian children who were diagnosed as being late talkers at the age of two with 109 children with similar backgrounds who had normal language abilities at the same age. Specifically, they looked at how the two groups differed by the time the children were seven.

They found that the later talkers were more likely to have language problems at age seven than those in the other group. The most significant problems concerned syntax (i.e. ordering words in a sentence correctly) and selection of grammatical tense.

They also found that, although there were more boys than girls with language problems at age two, there were no differences between the genders at age seven. And the children with language problems at seven generally scored in the normal range for non-verbal intelligence. So, although most of these children were probably not Einstein-type geniuses, they were similar to most of their peers in terms of their intellectual ability, if not necessarily their language skills.

The researchers stress that most late talkers soon catch up with their peers although, as a group, they are at greater risk for later language problems. However, it’s not clear what happens to accelerate some children’s language development. With more knowledge in this area, practitioners might be able to better identify and help children with early language problems.

• Summary of “Language Outcomes of 7-Year-Old Children With or Without a History of Late Language Emergence at 24 Months” by Mabel L. Rice, Catherine L. Taylor, and Stephen R. Zubrick in Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, April 2008, Vol. 51, Issue 2, pp 394-407.