On the whole, language development among twins has been found to be about 1.7 months behind single babies at 20-months-old and 3.1 months behind at 3 years of age.
When Your Twins Should Start Talking. By 18 months, your twins should be able to say around twenty words. These will be simple words like mama and dadda. Your children will use various sounds and rhythms to “talk” as they play and interact with others.
LAWRENCE — A study of 473 sets of twins followed since birth found that compared with single-born children, 47 percent of 24-month-old identical twins had language delay compared with 31 percent of nonidentical twins. Overall, twins had twice the rate of late language emergence of single-born children.
Often, language delays in twins result from environmental and social factors. Treatment should therefore focus on improving language experiences for each twin in and out of the home. One-to-one parent interaction with each twin is important.
Twin Language Development
There is tons of variation in language scores among twins, but overall, research shows that twins do tend to fall behind in language a bit more than single-born children do. Male twins in particular are vulnerable, often falling about 6 months behind even female twins (Lewis & Thompson, 1992).
Most twins, triplets and more grow and develop along roughly the same lines as their singleton peers – even those who start out much smaller will catch up in time. But there is nothing to say twins, triplets or more have to reach milestones at the same time as each other.
It has been reported that up to 50% of young twins will have their own twin language which they use to communicate only with each other and cannot be understood by others.
The hardest thing about having twins is…
“Managing the movement of two babies. Carrying them both up and down the stairs, getting them into the car, etc.” —Simeon R. “Often having to make one baby wait!” —Catharine D. “Being outnumbered—the logistics of two on one is definitely the hardest.
It's a common misconception that twins skip a generation in families. There is absolutely no evidence, other than circumstantial, that twins are more likely to occur every other generation.
That's because twins are born prematurely 60 percent of the time and land in the costly neonatal intensive care unit more often than singletons. The article also mentions that these babies are more susceptible to mental retardation and learning disabilities.
Numerous studies have established that twins, triplets and other sets of multiples have a higher likelihood of speech delays. (It's also more common in identical twins and multiples than in fraternal.)
It is likely that twins' awareness of one another starts sooner than seven or eight months of age. An article by the late doctor, T. Berry Brazelton, observed that at age three to four months, an infant identical female twin seemed disoriented when her sister was removed from the room.
At 10 months:
This is when having twins becomes a true perk: your twins will begin playing with each other! They may not be throwing a ball back and forth just yet, but they'll likely make each other laugh. Now they're not only amused by their parents, but with each other as well.
Most babies say their first word sometime between 12 and 18 months of age. However, you'll start to hear the early stages of verbal communication shortly after birth. "From birth to 3 months, babies make sounds. There's smiling and cooing," explains Loeffler.
In the first year of life, babies go from babbling to playing with sounds, copying sounds and putting sounds together. First words might start at around 12 months.
Speech/Language Milestones
Boys tend to develop language skills a little later than girls, but in general, kids may be labeled "late-talking children" if they speak less than 10 words by the age of 18 to 20 months, or fewer than 50 words by 21 to 30 months of age.
Monoamniotic-monochorionic Twins
These types of twins share a chorion, placenta, and an amniotic sac. This is the rarest type of twin, and it means a riskier pregnancy as the babies can get tangled in their own umbilical cords.
For a given pregnancy, the odds of conceiving fraternal twins are only determined by the mother's genetics, not the father's. Fraternal twins happen when two eggs are simultaneously fertilised instead of just one.
However, for a given pregnancy, only the mother's genetics matter. Fraternal twins happen when two eggs are simultaneously fertilized instead of just one. A father's genes can't make a woman release two eggs.
Being a twin has its benefits—tricking people, having a lifelong companion, sharing clothes—but it also has downsides. Many twins struggle to cultivate their own identities, while being so similar to one another. And that struggle lasts a lifetime, according to a recent study.
The reality is that raising multiples is hard. You have double or triple the feeding, diapering, and laundry and, as a result, less time to spend cuddling and getting to know each baby. To be sure, there will be days when you feel as if you're walking up a down escalator.
For women born 1870-1899, moms of twins averaged reproductive spans of 14 years 11 months versus 14 years for singleton moms. Both results were statistically significant. Moms of twins also were older at the time of their last birth.
Autonomous languages exist in about 40% of all twins, but often disappear soon. In this study, nine autonomous languages are compared: the circumstances in which they emerge, how these languages relate to the parents' language (the model language) and how they are structured.
Similar to the mind-reading myth, there are things that can't be explained. There are twins who say they have felt each other's pain. And their close relationship and nearly-identical physical structure means there could be a sliver of truth in the theory — as pain can be psychological and can be felt empathetically.