Comparative study on the acquisition of open class and closed class words in children with typical language development

Abstract

Introduction: The increasing of vocabulary is an aspect of great importance for the child’s cognitive development. Covering various aspects of words as their pronunciations, definitions of their meanings, syntactic rules of their uses and the way words are written. Purpose: to investigate the acquisition of open and closed class words in children aged 2 years to 4 years, 11 months and 29 days, enrolled in preschools within the municipal public network of Santa Maria. Methods: the sample was composed of 72 children development, distributed evenly among age groups. Filming of spontaneous speech of each subject was held, and after, was held the analysis of the vocabulary and mean length of utterance. For statistical analysis was used the Statistical Analysis System, 9.2, and Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis tests, with significance level p<0.05. Results: it was not observed influence of gender in performance acquisition of speech. However, as to the age group, it can be observed significant difference in the acquisition of closed-class words. Conclusion: According to the results, it was concluded that the acquisition of open class words is not influenced by gender and age variables. There was a positive relationship between acquisition of closed-class words and the age range, being higher in children with higher age.