Fricatives at 18 months as a measure for predicting vocabulary and grammar at 24 and 30 months

• 67% of children were producing at least one fricative in a word by 18 months.
• Children who produced early fricatives had significantly better vocabulary scores.
• Children who produced early fricatives used more grammatical markers.
• Early production of fricatives may facilitate expressive language development.

PurposeLanguage develops at variable rates in young children, yet markers for different developmental trajectories, have not been identified. Production of fricatives in words may be one marker because they are later developing sounds and contribute to syntactic production. We examined whether children who produced fricatives in words by 18 months had better vocabulary and grammar scores at 18, 24, and 30 months than children who did not.MethodThe expressive language skills of 37 toddlers who did and did not produce fricatives in words by 18 months of age were compared at 18, 24 and 30 months of age.ResultsExpressive vocabulary scores and the use of grammatical markers were significantly better for children who produced fricatives by 18 months than for those who did not. This effect was consistent across scores at 18, 24, and 30 months. The total number of consonants and total number of fricatives produced at 18 months did not significantly predict expressive vocabulary scores.ConclusionsBecause the children who produced fricatives by 18 months demonstrated better expressive language skills than their peers who did not produce fricatives by 18 months, the early production of fricatives by toddlers may be a marker of a faster expressive language developmental trajectory.Learning outcomes: Readers will: (1) describe the relationship between early phonological development and early expressive lexical development, (2) describe the role of perceptual and motor development in speech sound the acquisition, and (3) describe the potential relationship between the production of fricatives and expressive language development.