The relation between grammatical development and mean length of utterance in morphemes

ABSTRACTA widely held practice in many studies of child language development and disorders has been to employ an easily calculated numerical metric, mean length of utterance measured in morphemes (MLU), as a ‘general index of grammatical development’. While this practice seems to have found acceptance among many students of child language, the usefulness of MLU past Stage II has been assumed but never empirically tested. This study evaluated the grammatical performance and MLU of 18 normally developing 2- and 3-year-old children and found that MLU did not correlate significantly with age (r = 0·26), nor did it discriminate children's profiles of grammatical development.

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Assessing the impact of conversational overlap in content on child language growth

Journal of Child Language ◽

10.1017/s0305000917000083 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 45 (1) ◽

pp. 72-96 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

ELIZABETH S. CHE ◽

PATRICIA J. BROOKS ◽

MARIA F. ALARCON ◽

FRANCIS D. YANNACO ◽

SEAMUS DONNELLY

Keyword(s):

Language Development ◽

New England ◽

Child Language ◽

Language Outcomes ◽

Time Points ◽

Parents And Children ◽

Language Growth ◽

Mean Length Of Utterance ◽

The Impact ◽

Over Time

AbstractWhen engaged in conversation, both parents and children tend to re-use words that their partner has just said. This study explored whether proportions of maternal and/or child utterances that overlapped in content with what their partner had just said contributed to growth in mean length of utterance (MLU), developmental sentence score, and vocabulary diversity over time. We analyzed the New England longitudinal corpus from the CHILDES database, comprising transcripts of mother–child conversations at 14, 20, and 32 months, using the CHIP command to compute proportions of utterances with overlapping content. Rates of maternal overlap, but not child overlap, at earlier time-points predicted child language outcomes at later time-points, after controlling for earlier child MLU. We suggest that maternal overlap plays a formative role in child language development by providing content that is immediately relevant to what the child has in mind.

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Mean Length of Utterance in Cypriot Greek-speaking Children

Journal of Greek Linguistics ◽

10.1163/15699846-01601002 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 16 (1) ◽

pp. 117-140 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Louiza Voniati

Keyword(s):

Language Development ◽

Child Language ◽

Language Assessment ◽

Typically Developing ◽

Future Studies ◽

Positive Correlation ◽

Significant Difference ◽

Mean Length Of Utterance ◽

Age Range

While research undertaken worldwide indicates that mean length of utterance (MLU) is a valuable index in investigations of child language development, to date there have been no studies exploring MLU in pre-primary Cypriot Greek (CYG)-speaking children. The participants in this study were 36 monolingual CYG-speaking children at ages 36, 40, 44 and 48 months, with a typical course of language development. The findings demonstrated that MLU counted in words (MLU-w) of typically developing CYG-speaking children had a positive correlation with age (from 36 to 48 months) and a non-significant difference in MLU-w by gender at each age point, and that typically developing CYG-speaking children, for the age range studied, tended to produce more multiword utterance types. An outcome of this study is an MLU-w database which could be used, with some caution, in the language assessment of a similar population or as the basis for future studies. Areas for further research are identified.

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The relation of utterance length to grammatical complexity in normal and language-disordered groups

Applied Psycholinguistics ◽

10.1017/s014271640000936x ◽

1991 ◽

Vol 12 (1) ◽

pp. 23-46 ◽

Cited By ~ 98

Author(s):

Hollis S. Scarborough ◽

Leslie Rescorla ◽

Helen Tager-Flusberg ◽

Anne E. Fowler ◽

Vicki Sudhalter

Keyword(s):

Down Syndrome ◽

Language Development ◽

Fragile X Syndrome ◽

Fragile X ◽

Syntactic Complexity ◽

Grammatical Development ◽

Two Measures ◽

Grammatical Complexity ◽

Linguistic Proficiency ◽

Mean Length Of Utterance

ABSTRACTMean length of utterance (MLU) in morphemes was examined as a predictor of the grammatical complexity of natural language corpora of normal preschoolers and of children and adolescents with delayed language, Fragile X syndrome, Down syndrome, and autism. The Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) served as the measure of syntactic and morphological proficiency. For all groups, a strong curvilinear association between measures was found across the MLU range from 1.0 to about 4.5. Correlations were weaker when MLU exceeded 3.0 than during earlier stages of language development, however, confirming previous suggestions that MLU becomes less closely associated with grammatical development as linguistic proficiency increases. For the language-disordered groups, moreover, the curves relating the two measures differed from the curves for the normal preschoolers because MLU frequently overestimated actual IPSyn scores. The results are discussed with respect to the use of MLU in conjunction with other measures of syntactic complexity in the study of atypical language development.

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Children’s Recall of Approximations to English

Journal of Speech and Hearing Research ◽

10.1044/jshr.1602.201 ◽

1973 ◽

Vol 16 (2) ◽

pp. 201-212 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Elizabeth Carrow ◽

Michael Mauldin

Keyword(s):

Language Development ◽

Fourth Order ◽

Third Order ◽

Memory Processes ◽

The Third ◽

General Index ◽

General Linguistic

As a general index of language development, the recall of first through fourth order approximations to English was examined in four, five, six, and seven year olds and adults. Data suggested that recall improved with age, and increases in approximation to English were accompanied by increases in recall for six and seven year olds and adults. Recall improved for four and five year olds through the third order but declined at the fourth. The latter finding was attributed to deficits in semantic structures and memory processes in four and five year olds. The former finding was interpreted as an index of the development of general linguistic processes.

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The Concurrent Validity of the Minnesota Child Development Inventory as a Measure of Young Children's Language Development

Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders ◽

10.1044/jshd.5401.101 ◽

1989 ◽

Vol 54 (1) ◽

pp. 101-105 ◽

Cited By ~ 19

Author(s):

J. Bruce Tomblin ◽

Cynthia M. Shonrock ◽

James C. Hardy

Keyword(s):

Child Development ◽

Language Development ◽

Expressive Language ◽

Strong Predictor ◽

Receptive Language ◽

Strongly Correlated ◽

Language Measure ◽

The Mean ◽

Child Development Inventory ◽

Mean Length Of Utterance

The extent to which the Minnesota Child Development Inventory (MCDI), could be used to estimate levels of language development in 2-year-old children was examined. Fifty-seven children between 23 and 28 months were given the Sequenced Inventory of Communication Development (SICD), and at the same time a parent completed the MCDI. In addition the mean length of utterance (MLU) was obtained for each child from a spontaneous speech sample. The MCDI Expressive Language scale was found to be a strong predictor of both the SICD Expressive scale and MLU. The MCDI Comprehension-Conceptual scale, presumably a receptive language measure, was moderately correlated with the SICD Receptive scale; however, it was also strongly correlated with the expressive measures. These results demonstrated that the Expressive Language scale of the MCDI was a valid predictor of expressive language for 2-year-old children. The MCDI Comprehension-Conceptual scale appeared to assess both receptive and expressive language, thus complicating its interpretation.

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Variations in the Home Language Environment and Early Language Development in Rural China

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health ◽

10.3390/ijerph18052671 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 18 (5) ◽

pp. 2671

Author(s):

Yue Ma ◽

Laura Jonsson ◽

Tianli Feng ◽

Tyler Weisberg ◽

Teresa Shao ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Language Development ◽

Child Language ◽

Language Skills ◽

Rural China ◽

Home Language ◽

Early Language ◽

Early Language Development ◽

Language Environment ◽

Conversational Turns ◽

Home Language Environment

The home language environment is critical to early language development and subsequent skills. However, few studies have quantitatively measured the home language environment in low-income, developing settings. This study explores variations in the home language environment and child language skills among households in poor rural villages in northwestern China. Audio recordings were collected for 38 children aged 20–28 months and analyzed using Language Environment Analysis (LENA) software; language skills were measured using the MacArthur–Bates Mandarin Communicative Developmental Inventories expressive vocabulary scale. The results revealed large variability in both child language skills and home language environment measures (adult words, conversational turns, and child vocalizations) with 5- to 6-fold differences between the highest and lowest scores. Despite variation, however, the average number of adult words and conversational turns were lower than found among urban Chinese children. Correlation analyses did not identify significant correlations between demographic characteristics and the home language environment. However, the results do indicate significant correlations between the home language environment and child language skills, with conversational turns showing the strongest correlation. The results point to a need for further research on language engagement and ways to increase parent–child interactions to improve early language development among young children in rural China.

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The acquisition of routines in child language

Language in Society ◽

10.1017/s0047404500006977 ◽

1976 ◽

Vol 5 (2) ◽

pp. 129-136 ◽

Cited By ~ 75

Author(s):

Jean Berko Gleason ◽

Sandra Weintraub

Keyword(s):

Language Development ◽

Social Factors ◽

Child Language ◽

Ethnographic Research ◽

Age Changes ◽

Adult Participation ◽

Parental Input

ABSTRACTThe acquisition of routines is one aspect of language development. Routines such as Bye-bye, in contrast to more referential language, appear to be among the earliest acquisitions and are congruent with the sensori-motor child's capacities. This study investigates performance of the highly constrained Hallowe'en Trick or treat routine in 115 children from 2 to 16 years of age. Changes in competence and the role of parental input are examined in relation to cognitive and social factors. (First routines; the Hallowe'en interaction; children's production; adult participation; adult metalanguage; implications for ethnographic research.)

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Type/Token Ratios: what do they really tell us?

Journal of Child Language ◽

10.1017/s0305000900012885 ◽

1987 ◽

Vol 14 (2) ◽

pp. 201-209 ◽

Cited By ~ 100

Author(s):

Brian Richards

Keyword(s):

Language Development ◽

Sample Size ◽

Linear Relationship ◽

Child Language ◽

Lexical Diversity ◽

Diversity Measure ◽

Closed Class ◽

Language Research ◽

Non Linear

ABSTRACTType/Token Ratios have been extensively used in child language research as an index of lexical diversity. This paper shows that the measure has frequently failed to discriminate between children at widely different stages of language development, and that the ratio may in fact fall as children get older. It is suggested here that such effects are caused by a negative, though non-linear, relationship between sample size (i.e. number of tokens) and Type/Token Ratio. Effects of open and closed class items are considered and an alternative Verbal Diversity measure is examined. Standardization of the number of tokens before computing Type/Token Ratios is recommended.

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