Your Toddler's Vocabulary Could Be More Revealing Than You Think

By Gerelyn Terzo

If you are wondering how your child processes information, you might want to pay attention to the words they choose to speak. According to the latest study by the Applied Psycholinguistics journal, the average 18-month old can identify roughly 260 words. By the time they are in preschool, toddlers have the capacity to control a vocabulary of somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 words.

As a Florida mother of a one-and-a-half-year-old baby girl recently learned, it’s not so much the size of the words but how your child uses them that counts. Victoria Swift, who previously taught elementary school, was left baffled by how her toddler was processing words and images. She took to social media platform TikTok to share her experience, which all began when her daughter started associating her green peppermint stuffed toys and gingerbread man figurines with hippopotamus, curiously yet confidently calling them “hippos.”

“She knows a lot of words and is super smart so I knew there had to be a reason why she was calling all things gingerbread 'hippo,'" said Swift cited by Newsweek.

It turns out she was right. Upon opening one of her daughter’s ABC books, which attaches letters, words and pictures, Swift discovered her answer. Directly to the left of the letter “H” page, which was adorned with a smiling pink hippo, was the “G” is for Gingerbread page, adorned in nothing else but a peppermint candies trail and smiling gingerbread man – similar to the items in her daughter’s toy chest.

Now, instead of confusion, Swift was beaming with pride for her daughter’s ability to single handedly make those word connections, which the former teacher said was “very impressive to me for her age.” Having clocked in millions of views for her short video on TikTok, Swift learned that her daughter wasn’t the only mother of a genius.

Another toddler associated octopus with “applepus” to match the image of an octopus with an apple-shaped head on his detangling spray. Yet another young child started answering to “aww” like it was his name because of the family’s tendency to respond to him and pictures of him by saying, “Aww, look at you!”

Yet another Mommy commenter shared, “There was a Carl’s Jr. next to my daughter’s daycare. Anytime she saw a Carl’s Jr., she’d yell, "There's my school!”

Don’t fret if your child isn’t making impressive word associations just yet. According to the Mayo Clinic, every toddler will grow at their own pace. As a point of reference, a two-year old should have a vocabulary of 50-100 words, while by the age of three they should have a command on a minimum of 200 words. If you are worried your child might be falling behind, have a conversation with your pediatrician to put your mind at ease.