Scientists have listed the 25 "must have" words every child should know by the age of two.
The words and phrases, which cover toys, food, animals and, of course, include ‘mummy’ and ‘daddy’ and ‘bye bye’ are designed to detect youngsters who could struggle with words for years come.
Being slow to talk could also be a sign of deeper problems from deafness to autism.
The 25 "must have" words are part of a much larger list of 310 words that should be in a toddler’s vocabulary and designed to be ticked off in 10 minutes by parents.
The average child will know 150 of the words in the Language Development Survey but scores of 75 to 225 are normal.
Alarm bells should start ringing if a toddler uses just 50 of the words or less, the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual conference heard.
The 25 words listed are among the most common and the first acquired when learning to speak.
"If children don’t use most of these words by 24 months, they may be late talkers," the Daily Mail quoted Leslie Rescorla, who designed both versions of the test as saying.
Many late-talkers are simply late bloomers, so the professor says that if a child is otherwise developing normally, parents shouldn’t panic.
However, if the child is still struggling for words by two and a half, they should consider help such as speech therapy, and certainly not put this off past the age of three.
The Vancouver conference heard that up to 20 percent of all two-year-olds are behind their peers in speech.
Of these, half to three-quarters of kids are likely to be late-bloomers, who will more or less catch up over time. (ANI)
ANI is South Asia's leading Multimedia News Agency providing content for every information platform, including TV, Internet, broadband, newspapers and mobiles. 