Children’s expressive vocabulary in social isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT Purpose: to characterize and classify the frequency of occurrence of expressive vocabulary words in children during the social isolation of the pandemic period. Methods: a quantitative study with a sample consisting of 44 typical children, aged between 18 and 37 months. The assessments applied to the sample to compose the eligibility criteria were carried out during the pandemic. The study used the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (IDC-MacArthur), adapted to Brazilian Portuguese, answered by parents/guardians, to assess children’s expressive vocabulary and subsequently analyze them in terms of frequencies and occurrences of words produced. To evaluate the frequency of occurrence of words, the FREQ procedure was used and the classification of occurrences as High, Medium and Low Frequency, using tercile analysis for distribution. Results: the results show the classification of the percentage of word occurrences, providing examples of high, medium and low frequency words. The high frequency words included familiar and everyday words, inserted in early childhood, the medium frequency words were distributed in daily life activities and their relationships and finally, the low frequency words resulted in more specific words, also related to the structure of Portuguese. Conclusion: the high-frequency expressive vocabulary words were related to family members, greetings, sounds of animals, body parts, and toys. The medium frequency ones pointed to a diversity of words (food, activities, clothing, actions), the low frequency ones pointed to connectors and verbs.