ALBERT Einstein did not start talking until he was three.

These days, I mutter this mantra under my breath whenever I anticipate the onset of a panic attack: "Einstein did not start talking until he was three..."

If you're a parent of a late talker, you would probably know what this is about. My younger son, Lucien, is 20 months old but his vocabulary is still limited to just a handful of words: "Papa", "Mama", "kor kor" (big brother), "no more", "nice nice" and "aiyah". I'm not even sure if "aiyah" counts as a word.

Most of the time, he relies on a range of grunts and cries to articulate his needs and wants.

In contrast, his elder brother Julian, now five, started babbling early and could string together sentences shortly after he turned two. Since then, he has become a chatterbox and it is, sometimes, impossible to get him to be silent for even a minute.

I know where Julian got his eloquence - or verbosity - from: Me. It has become such that there is a surfeit of storytellers and shortage of ears at home.

Recently, while I was telling the Supportive Spouse a work-day anecdote, Julian declared seriously: "Mummy, those are things that happened to your girlfriends and you. No need to tell Papa. We should be talking about more important things."

He proceeded to steer the conversation towards himself. Anyway, I digress.

Apart from an array of very expressive toddler gibberish, Lucien is taking his time to learn to speak. However, some people claim that they understand him perfectly. Big brother Julian says that Lucien speaks his own invented language, "Gorea", which they use to communicate.

My cousin told me, on an outing a couple of months back, that Lucien had pointed at her bag and asked: "Whose is this?"

"I understood him perfectly," she said, amazed. When she told him it was hers, he nodded as though to say "okay".

Nevertheless, the kiasu parent in me is starting to get concerned.

Could the "late development" in speech be because I read a lot more to Julian than I did to Lucien? Could his "problem" be exacerbated by the fact that I allow the boys to watch a lot more television than I did in the past? Should I be more stringent in enforcing a no-baby-talk rule with our domestic helper?

It doesn't help that my friends' children seem to be fluent beyond their years. After seeing an old YouTube video of my supermum-girlfriend M's son reciting words like "rhino", tea" and "three" to a nursery rhyme - clear as crystal - at the age of 20 months, I had a mini freak-out.

"He's so clever!" I wrote hysterically on M's Facebook page. "Reassure me that my son's speech development is normal!"

She wrote back promptly, with the stock response that experts use to reassure paranoid parents like me: "Einstein did not start speaking until he was three."

In fact, there is even a book about this phenomenon, 2001's The Einstein Syndrome by Thomas Sowell. In it, the author details a group of children who range from being normal to exceptionally bright, yet go past their fourth birthday before beginning to talk.

In an article for Jewish World Review, Sowell elaborated: "Those portions of (Einstein's) brain where analytical thinking were concentrated had spread out far beyond their usual areas and spilled over into adjoining areas, including the region from which speech is usually controlled.

"This has led some neuroscientists to suggest that his genius and his late talking could be related."

The Einstein analogy is comforting. And it makes sense.

Lucien's motor skills have been on track, and he has been quicker to pick up almost everything, compared to his brother at the same age.

Perhaps he has been getting so much stimulus in other areas that his brain is busy handling it, putting speech on the back burner.

Or, it could just be that, observing that two chatterboxes in the family is quite enough, Lucien has simply decided he will hold his peace - for now.

As they say, it's all relative.

For more my paper stories click here.