Study of the most frequent expressive vocabulary in 18-24 month Kurdish-speaking children

Abstract

Introduction: Children’s initial lexicon vocabulary is one of the main dimensions of language development that is associated with the children utterance length mean. The aim of this study was to examine the most frequent expressive vocabulary of children 18 to 24 months in Sorani Kurdish language. Materials and Methods: The present research was conducted longitudinally (for 3 months) with a group of 16 Kurd children in city of Bukan. Data collection tools included, weekly vocabulary form, vocabulary list and demographic questionnaire. Nonparametric Friedman and Mann-Whitney U Tests were employed for data analysis. Results: Among the 67 words which were mostly uttered by 18 month children the highest percentage of words (60%) were the real words, that 68% of them were nouns. The highest percentage of the nouns used were included the categories of important people in life (30%), categories of animals (22%) and food (15%). The results of the Mann-Whitney test (p-value >0.05) showed that the two sexes did not display a significant difference in terms of expressive vocabulary and the results of Friedman nonparametric test (p-value