Expressive and receptive lexicons in Persian toddlers aged 12-14 months

Toddlers communicate through vocalizations, gestures and words. So, early diagnosis of vocabulary problems based on the developmental findings is the first step in the early intervention. It is essential to have developmental data based on each culture and geographic region. The aim of the current study was to investigate receptive and expressive lexicons in Persian toddlers using the McArthur Bates questionnaire-persian version. In this cross-sectional study, the expressive and receptive lexicons of 64 Farsi speaking toddlers aged 12 to 14 months (32 girls and 32 males) were investigated. The participants were invited through the Bardaskan health centers in Razavi Khorasan province, Iran. Then regarding to the inclusion criteria, toddlers were selected through simple non-probability sampling method. All mothers filled out the McArthur's expressive and receptive vocabulary lists-form I (397 words). The mean ± SD for the receptive lexicon was 147.64 ± 37.57, and for the expressive lexicon was 18.22 ± 12.26. Considerably, there were no significant differences between boys and girls in any of these variables (p>0.05). Meaningly, Toddlers showed different preferences for the subcategories of receptive and expressive vocabularies. While for the receptive lexicon, main words belonged to the verbs, names of the small appliances, and food subcategories, in expressive vocabulary people's names, environmental sounds and games and daily routines were at the top. There is a direct and significant relationship between age and the lexicon size (p < 0/05, r = 0/4) The findings of the present study showed that the lexicon development of Toddlers in Bardscan follows the universal of language development. Since the receptive lexicon developed before the expressive one, the size of receptive lexicon was larger than the size of the expressive one, and the size of expressive lexicon increased with age. Even toddlers in Bardscan have lexical preferences which were similar to the toddlers from different languages and cultures. The only difference between the participants of the present study and toddlers from different languages or cultures was the size of the both lexicons. Consequently,Toddlers in Bardscan had larger receptive and expressive lexicons that might be related to the culture and the extent of the relationship between them and the other people.