posting for Charles Watkins

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Info-Childers

(Aplogies for the delay: I've been having trouble getting the server to accept
my mails.)

Many thanks to all who replied. The majority of the replies pointed me in the
direction of Brian Richards and David Malvern in Reading. Brian himself
replied and has since been most helpful in sending me a large envelope by
snail-mail. A public thank you to him. I set out below extracts from answers
which cited work other than that of Brian and his colleagues:

>>From Mandy Kay Raining-Bird
Jon Miller has done some work in this area. For example, in his chapter in:
Research on child language disorders, A decade of progress (1991),
published by Pro-Ed.

>>From Rui Rothes-Neves:
the question is dealt with in "The statistical structure of a text and its
readability", by Juhan Tuldava, publ. in ALTMANN, G &HREBICEK, L.
Quantitative text analysis. Trier: wissenschaftlicher verlag trier (series
quantitative linguistics n.52),1993.


Stuart Campbell writes:
I have a little analysis of the interesting interaction of function words
on TTR and text length in my book "Translation into the second language"
Longman 1998.



Lynne Hewitt writes:
......However, I am aware that we in the language disorders community haved
moved
away from bothering with TTR because it tends to show very little
developmental progression.  A better measure that does seem to change with
age (and differentiate normal from disordered development) is the number of
different words in a sample of fixed length (NDW).  This is a better
estimate of lexical development, because it taps lexical diversity.  It is
the numerator in the TTR, essentially.  You count every different word, not
counting as different stems with inflectional morphologoy (goes, going, go
only count as 1 if all occur in the sample).

Again thanks to all

Charles Watkins.