As an adult, people have seen me as extremely articulate and have expressed surprise when I have told anecdotes about speech challenges I had as a toddler, as if toddlers who struggle to pronounce things can't possibly grow up to be articulate adults. But it's developmentally normal for toddlers to have some speech challenges and highly unusual for a child to skip that awkward stage -- though it does seem to happen in rare cases.
Some kids who talk late sometimes just start speaking in full sentences that are relatively articulate for their age, skipping the earlier developmental stages of one word alone and then two words which typically precede the use of sentences. I've heard more than one personal anecdote over the years from people I knew online or knew in person.
"Einstein Syndrome" is a term some people use for this pattern of development and that phrase may help you find relevant articles if you know a speech delayed child and are fretting about it. The phrase doesn't necessarily mean such kids are bright. It just means Einstein talked late, someone coined a phrase based on that fact and we have relatively little hard data or theories about what is going on with such children who follow this developmental pattern. [1]
I'm aware of this as a pattern because one of my sons was speech delayed. I knew he already could use sentences and was choosing not to do so.
When he was sixteen, it came out he was comparing himself to his college-educated mother and feeling "stupid," so he stuck with two-word phrases for about an extra year. I temporarily placed him in preschool to politely force him to talk more. At age sixteen, he finally got over being mad at me for that and thanked me and said he might not have ever learned to talk without that because learning to talk was hard for him.
He's twice exceptional. He has both big strengths and big weaknesses. I'm someone with criticisms of the general concept of "Some people are SMART and others are DUMB!"
I also knew a mom on Tagmax who said her non-verbal child one day began exactly mimicking full sentences from some tape-recorded thing she played regularly which had a male voice. I speculated that the child may have had some hearing issues and the voice on the tape somehow worked for the kid better than Mom's voice.
(It is a known thing that women's voices are higher pitched than men's voices and thus poorly understood by some people with certain kinds of hearing impairment.)
I don't actually remember these incidents from my early childhood. These were anecdotes told to me by relatives when I was older:
My mother told me I had trouble learning to say the letter F and she taught me to say it by telling me to put my hand in front of my mouth so I could feel my breath as I said it. She showed me what she did and she had me hold my hand flat and blow across the back of my hand such that it didn't block the sound.
When I was twelve, my older sister told me what I called her as a toddler and she was like "No one has ANY idea why you called me that. It sounds NOTHING like my name."
Yeah, right. Does too, but first you need to see life through my eyes as a toddler with a German mother and American father.
Our father named both my sister and I and my German mother spoke no English when they met. When we were little, mom didn't call either of us by the exact name on our birth certificate. She couldn't pronounce our actual names.
The name I used for my sister was my best attempt to call my sister what our mother called her, minus the letters I couldn't pronounce. Because I would have heard my sister's name from our mother more than anyone else and as a toddler I had no idea that what Mom called her was different from her written name on her birth certificate.
At age two, my oldest kept asking to watch "Bobby." For some weeks or months, I had no idea what he was asking me for.
Bobby is the name of the dead son of a character played by Jessica Tandy in that smash hit children's film Batteries Cluded, which is what he called it after he stopped calling it Bobby. You might know it better as Batteries Not Included.
The point I'm trying to make is that not only do children have challenges pronouncing things, they perceive things differently from older people around them. I doubt any adult would latch onto the name "Bobby" as an important character in the movie. He's long dead and there are no retrospective flashback scenes.
But it's a much repeated word by a main character and that fact is central to the plot. She nearly dies in a fire because of it.
At twelve, I instantly knew the moment she said it why I called my sister the nickname I couldn't remember having called her. I couldn't understand why no one in the family ever recognized it as "the short form" of her name the exact equivalent of my mother calling me Dorena for years and people shortening it to Rena as a nickname.
In a traditional family with a full-time homemaker mother, the words their mother uses will be the words children learn for people and things in their environment. If that person speaks English as a second language, has an accent or any other personal quirks, you need to run those speech quirks of the person they spend the most time with through your mental "toddler speak" software to puzzle it out.
Last, some speech impediments are physical, not developmental. As one example, a shortened frenulum of the tongue -- that's the piece of skin that connects the tongue to the bottom of the mouth in front -- can interfere with pronunciation of sounds like the diphthong TH.
(Yes, I'm very well aware that if you search for frenulum instead of frenulum of the tongue, your top hit is probably something else. And it's NSFW.)
If a child has significant dental issues, it may be appropriate to take them to an orthodontist in elementary school for early intervention. This can help ease some things even if they never get braces.
I respected the wishes of my children to not get braces and, in one case, to not get surgical intervention for a shortened frenulum of the tongue. Most people don't realize he still has a speech impediment.
As he explains it, if he really needs to distinguish deaf from death, he can use different words entirely. And, honestly, those two words can be easily confused by the listener for a long list of reasons, from background noise to CAPD to hearing impairment, so that's a best policy even if you have no speech impediments.
This post inspired by a YouTube short with a nice tip suggesting you ask your toddler to show you what they are trying to ask for instead of fruitlessly guessing repeatedly what word they are butchering.
Footnote
[1] It has been established that Einstein's first wife, Mileva, was denied a degree but actually had better grades than he had in college and she cowrote his scientific papers while they were married.
It is somewhat questionable whether or not Albert Einstein was really an intellectual giant standing head and shoulders above everyone around him. It is much more likely he was twice exceptional and got sole credit for the work of two bright people working together.
But if you have a speech delayed child, so-called "Einstein Syndrome" offers some hope that your child isn't simply "dumb" and "will never catch up." It's strong evidence that there are a variety of different developmental paths and children who fall outside the expected norms can flourish if you don't destroy their self esteem and dictate to them that "YOU are merely DUMB."