Expressive vocabulary of children with normal and deviant phonological development.

Background: expressive vocabulary of children with normal and deviant phonological development.

Aim: to determine whether alterations presented by children with phonological disorders occur only at the phonological level or if there are any impacts on lexical acquisition; to compare the vocabulary performance of children with phonological disorders to reference values presented by the used test.

Method: participants of the study were 36 children of both genders, 14 with phonological disorders (Study group) and 22 with typical language development (Control Group). The ABFW - Vocabulary Test (Befi-Lopes, 2000) was used for assessing the expressive vocabulary of children and later to compare the performance of both groups.

Results: the performance of children with phonological disorder in the expressive vocabulary test is similar to that of children with normal phonological development. Most of the children of both groups reached the benchmarks proposed by the test for the different semantic fields. The semantic field Places demonstrated to be the most complex for both groups.

Conclusion: the alterations presented by children with phonological disorder area limited to the phonological level, having no impact on the lexical aspect of language.