B.,
If you are in Las Vegas, you can call Child Find ###-###-####. They are part of the school district and will evaluate him for free. If they decide he's delayed and qualified for services, the will provide free services. Just in general, Nevada Early Intervention provides services from birth to age 3 and then Child Find does ages 3 and up. My son used Early Intervention for a year and now he's been with the school district since September (he's 3.5). I'm really happy with the school district program. My son is mildly autistic (which they determined because my pediatrician was absolutely clueless) with serious language delays. At almost 3 he had the language ability of a 20 month old. He's in an autism classroom 6 hours a day, 5 days a week and he get the extended school year so he goes 220 days a year (normal is 180). As part of all of that he gets 90 minutes a week of speech therapy, 500 minutes a week of behavioral/social skills therapy, 500 minutes a week of cognitive/readiness, and then 100 minutes a week each of self help, fine motor skills and gross motor skills. It is all free and they will bus him to and from school also. I can't stress enough how helpful it is to access the free services. We are also paying for private speech therapy (we started that because we didn't have a very good experience with Early Intervention and he's doing well in it so we didn't want to cancel it when he started preschool) and it is $120 an hour and our insurance won't cover any of it. Free is good.
Oh, and Child Find will also test your son's hearing to make sure that is normal. I really can't tell you how impressed I am with their services. Their special needs preschool is light years ahead of their regular K-12 education in terms of quality.
If you want to do some stuff at home, a few things that we have done that helped are 1. Signing Time DVDs. www.signingtime.com They show the sign, repeat the word verbal a number of times and then show kids doing the signs and saying the word verbally. I have volumes 1-9 but I think volumes 1-3 are sufficient for most of the basic stuff like eat, water, play, milk, etc.... A lot of people think if you teach your kid some basic sign language that it will delay their speech because they don't "have" to talk. That is really untrue. It gives your kid a way to communicate with you while they are working on verbal speech and with my son, it gave him a visual representation of words and communication that helped him tremendously. It truly won't hurt your son's verbal language development to use sign language. 2. script language for him. If he whines for a cookie (or points or what he does) script it for him "Oh, you want a cookie? Can you say 'I want a cookie. That's right, I want a cookie. Here is your cookie." It seems kind of ridiculous but after a while it really helps. You basically just start "feeding" your kid what he should be saying in specific situations. And then in general, you keep up a constant flow of words and you endlessly name things and what you are doing, etc... It is hard at first but you get used to it. I could probably think of a few more activities if you are interested. At this point, I think we've tried virtually everything. If you are interested, email me directly ____@____.com
Oh, and I know you will probably get all sorts of answers that say boys just start talking later than girls and all of that. In some cases that is true and if you do nothing it may be fine. But I didn't want to look back a year or two down the road and wish that I would have done something. In my opinion, you should always err on the side of caution and have your son evaluated. The school district program doesn't just deal with autistic kids like my son. They deal with all sorts of developmental delays and they've got a full staff of speech therapist. My son's preschool is a block from my house and they've got programs all over the valley so it isn't like you'll be sending him across town. When you've got a kid with significant language delays, the further behind they are, the harder it is to catch up. I wanted my son to be as normal speech wise (this was before we knew he was autistic but I still want it!) as possible before he starts grade school because kids are really mean to kids who are different. There is so much that can be done for kids with developmental delays that are caught and dealt with early that it is amazing. We fully expect and so do my son's teachers - that my son will be able to start kindergarten in a regular classroom with typical kids and that there is a strong possibility with continued therapy that he will not be identifyable as autistic by anyone who doesn't know he's autistic. He would have had no chance of that if we wouldn't have started getting him services early. I know it isn't easy to put yourself out there and take a chance that they will tell you your kid isn't "normal" but I really think (based on my experience) that it is worth the risk to make sure your son does well long term.
You've got to figure the worst case scenario is that a little speech therapy will help kick start him talking and the best case scenario is that it will get him talking at an age appropriate level in no time at all.
FWIW, we had tons of people tell us that we just needed to put our son in daycare so he'd have to compete with the other kids and "need" to talk. Basically, we had tons of people say that my son didn't talk because my husband and I were spoiling him and not "making" him talk. Well, we put him in daycare and he was there for a year and it didn't help at all. He didn't actually really start talking until we took him out of daycare. He needed one on one help, not to be lost in a sea of 30 kids. Maybe it helps some kids but I think if your child has a genuine language/development delay, it isn't going to do much. From my perspective, it isn't a bad thing to try but I would still get an evaluation anyway. The older he gets the further behind he'll be and the harder it will be to catch up.
T.