A preliminary study on the composition of the early expressive lexicon in Egyptian infants and toddlers

Objective The aim of this study was to gain insight into early vocabulary size in Egyptian children aged between 12 and 30 months and to study the children’s lexicon composition at that young age while studying some demographic factors that might affect early vocabulary development. Participants and methods Parents of 150 children joining day care nurseries in Cairo were asked to fill in the Arabic vocabulary checklist designed in this study. The children were divided according to their age into three groups and then further subdivided according to their vocabulary size into low-vocabulary and high-vocabulary groups. Results Range and median and vocabulary percentages were estimated. Vocabulary size in older children is larger than younger children. More word types developed in the high-vocabulary group in younger age than in low-vocabulary group. All types of vocabulary continued to grow in older children in both low-vocabulary and high-vocabulary groups. There are differences between high-vocabulary and low-vocabulary groups in some demographic factors. Conclusion In this study, the vocabulary size for Arabic infants and toddlers is less than some languages. There are delays and differences between low-vocabulary and high-vocabulary groups regarding the linguistic composition and some demographic factors.