Vocabulary performance in institutionalized preschool children

PURPOSE: to evaluate the vocabulary performance of institutionalized children and compare it with the performance of children which belong to public and private schools. METHODS: 16 children at institutional care in shelter, of both genders, aged between 4 and 5 years and 11 months (experimental group) participated. As the control group, 32 children from public (n=16) and private (n=16) schools matched for age participated, totaling 48 participants. A Vocabulary Test (ABFW) was used, to evaluate the performance of the vocabulary. This test verifies the child's lexical competence and the resources of significance used to name the target word. Statistical analysis of data was performed to analyze differences between the surveyed groups (Kruskal-Wallis). RESULTS: it was possible to observe that institutionalized children showed lower performance in the vocabulary test in relation to the control groups, which showed no differences between them. In addition, all children showed more difficulty in the semantic fields "professions" and "places". CONCLUSION: children in situations of institutional care have underperformed vocabulary for their age and inferior than the performance of preschool children in public and private schools who reside with their families.