When a bilingual toddler seems to forget Spanish, it's almost always normal vocabulary fluctuation during an English spurt. An SLP explains what's happening and what to do.
Last week a parent in our community sent me a message that began with “I think we broke it.” Her three-year-old, who had been answering happily in Spanish for months, had suddenly stopped. Not just stopped speaking — stopped responding, stopped recognizing words she’d known for over a year, even said “I don’t know that word, Mommy” about manzana. The mom was sure she’d done something wrong.
She hadn’t. What she was watching is one of the most common — and most alarming-looking — patterns in bilingual development. It almost always resolves on its own. But I understand the panic, because in the moment it looks exactly like loss.
I’m a speech-language pathologist, and I want to walk through what’s actually happening when a bilingual toddler appears to “forget” Spanish overnight, why it happens around predictable ages, and how to tell the difference between this and the rare situation that does need an evaluation.
The classic version of this phone call goes something like:
In my clinical experience it shows up most often somewhere between two and a half and four, with a second wave around the start of preschool. It rarely shows up in a child who’s only ever heard one language. It is, in other words, a bilingual-specific phenomenon — which is the first hint about what’s going on.
Toddler language doesn’t develop on a smooth curve. It develops in bursts and plateaus, with the occasional retraction. Estimates of how fast vocabulary actually arrives vary enormously depending on what’s being counted and which children were studied — you’ll see everything from one or two new words a day to eight — so I won’t hand you a number. What nobody disputes is the shape: long stretches that look like nothing is happening, punctuated by sudden gains. That’s a staggering amount of processing for a small brain.
When a bilingual child is in the middle of a major English spurt — usually triggered by more time at preschool, a new sibling forcing English-dominant interactions, more time with English-speaking peers, or a big media diet shift — the brain prioritizes whatever input is most pressing. Spanish doesn’t disappear. It moves to the background while English gets sorted.
Researchers call this language dominance shift or, in the more dramatic moments, temporary suppression. The Spanish vocabulary is still in there. The neural connections are still firing. What’s changed is which language wins the race to be retrieved when the child opens their mouth.
A useful analogy: imagine a toddler’s brain as a small house with two libraries — English and Spanish. When a big shipment of new English books arrives, the kid spends two months in the English library reshelving. The Spanish library is still there. They just aren’t visiting it as often.
A few things compound the appearance of regression at this age:
I’ve worked with hundreds of bilingual families and I can count on one hand the cases where this pattern turned out to be actual language loss in a typically developing child. The expressive output drops; the underlying knowledge stays.
Most of the time, this is normal. But there are a few signs that would prompt me to suggest a bilingual SLP evaluation rather than wait it out:
Probably normal, give it time:
Worth getting evaluated:
A bilingual SLP — not a monolingual SLP using a translated test — can evaluate this properly. (We have a separate post on how to find a truly bilingual SLP, because that is its own challenge.)
Assuming the pattern fits the normal version — receptive comprehension intact, child is otherwise themselves — here’s what works.
Don’t quiz. Don’t pressure. This is the single most important thing. The fastest way to make a Spanish-resistant toddler dig in harder is to keep asking “how do you say apple in Spanish?” You will lose. Drop the test.
Keep speaking Spanish to them. Even if they’re only answering in English. Receptive input keeps the library warm. Their output will return when their internal threshold for risk drops again. In most children the expressive Spanish comes back within a few months — I’m not going to put a tighter range on it than that, because the honest spread between children is too wide for a precise number to mean anything.
Acknowledge the feeling, not the language choice. If your child says “I don’t want to speak Spanish anymore,” don’t argue. “Está bien. Yo te sigo hablando en español. Cuando quieras, está aquí para ti.” (That’s okay. I’ll keep speaking Spanish to you. Whenever you want, it’s here for you.)
Lean into low-stakes Spanish. Singing. Reading. Watching one familiar Spanish show. Sticker books. Things where there’s no expectation of output. These keep the input rich without triggering performance anxiety.
Watch for the return. When Spanish comes back — and in most cases it does — it usually comes back through one route: a beloved Spanish song, a specific word for a favorite food, a phrase to a grandparent. Notice it. Don’t make a big deal. Just keep going.
Ride out preschool start. If this is happening because school started, give it a full semester. The brain is doing a lot of social-language work in those first months, and most kids settle back into a more balanced bilingual rhythm by the second semester.
The fear in the message I got last week is the same fear I hear over and over: we did this beautiful thing, and now it’s gone, and it’s my fault. It almost never is. Language is not a glass that breaks if you drop it. It’s a muscle that gets quieter when something else needs the energy, and louder when it’s invited back.
Over the years I’ve worked with bilingual toddlers, the families who held steady — kept the input warm, dropped the testing, trusted the process — are the ones whose kids came back to Spanish. The families who panicked and pulled the plug usually ended up where they were afraid of being.
If your three-year-old answered you in English five times this week, that is not the story of your bilingual journey. That is one week.
One of the reasons I built the 12-month bilingual curriculum the way I did is for exactly these phases. The weekly themes mean the child keeps hearing Spanish in the same low-pressure shapes regardless of whether they’re outputting. No quiz. No performance. Just a parent reading the same scripted week alongside their kid.
If you’d rather start smaller, the printable freebie is a good way to keep one Spanish ritual going during a quiet phase.
If the pattern in this post matches what you’re seeing, you can probably exhale. Keep speaking. Keep singing. The library is still there.
— Lindsey
This page is part of Palabra Garden. View all pages: llms.txt · llms-full.txt