[The lexical aspects in children with expressive language delay]

This study examines the lexical characteristics of language development of 17 children between 24 and 41 months of age with a history of slow expressive language acquisition (experimental group). The purpose of the investigation is to compare these subjects to 49 children (ranging in age from 13-24 months) with a normal language history matched for vocabulary size to determine, whether the expressive vocabulary of children with language delay is same to normal group. The data were collected using the parental report instrument "Il Primo Vocabolario del Bambino"(Caselli and casadio 1995) the Italian version of MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (Fenson et al. 1993). For analyses of word production, children were divided into four groups based on their total vocabulary size: 1) 11 to 20 words; 2) 21 to 50 words; 3) 51 to 100 words; 4) 101 to 200 words. Analysis revealed a significant difference in verbs and grammatical function words when the level of vocabulary size of experimental group was between 21 and 50 words. In the other vocabulary size there were not significant differences. In summary the results of this study show that the vocabulary composition of children with slow expressive language acquisition is same that of children 14-16 months younger.