Abstract
The growth rate and the composition of expressive lexicon was studied in a sample of 903 infants between the age of 0;8 and 1;4 whose parents completed the Estonian adaptation of the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventory – Words and Gestures. As expected, older children had on average larger vocabularies compared to younger children. At the age of 1;4 the Estonian infants’ lexicon was smaller compared to the American-English children’s lexicon but larger than Italian and British-English infants’ vocabularies. The Estonian infants’ expressive lexicon has the same proportional distribution of semantic categories that other languages have been shown to have. On average, Estonian girls have larger vocabularies compared to boys. There are also some differences between boys and girls regarding the content of most frequently produced words. Results provide additional information about the rate of lexicon learning and proportional distribution of semantic categories in a language with rich morphology.
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