criteria of comparison

[Dan I. SLOBIN]

There are unsolvable problems, in my opinion, in attempting MLU counts in
a language like Italian, that has inflections that conflate several
meaning elements.  For example, how many morphemes--from a learner's point
of view--are contained in "i ragazzi"?  The actual count is quite high:

	i = definite article, masculine, plural
	ragazzi = boy, masculine, plural

That is six morphemes for 'the boy-s', which counts as three morphemes in
English.  Similar issues arise with regard to adjectives and verbs (e.g.,
do you count four morphemes for "parlo": speak, 1st-person, singular,
present?).  An MLU count for an individual child only makes sense if you
know whether the morphemes in question are productive--that is, whether
they can be applied across a range of lexical items, and especially if
they can be applied to new lexical items (real or nonce).  Lacking a
measure of productivity, a count in words might be better.  But then you'd
have to attend to what kinds of words are involved (i.e., part of speech)
as well as the possibility of "amalgams."  I would prefer a more careful
breakdown of the grammatical morphemes that are productively used by each
chid being investigated.

-Dan Slobin
Dept of Psychology
University of California, Berkeley

On Sat, 16 Dec 2000, Laura Mingoia wrote:

> Hello everybody!
> I'm Laura and I would like to ask you an opinion. In my dissertation I'm going to study the problem of the acquisition of language in Italian and English normal and languaged impaired children. Do you think that it is better to compare the different data for MLU counted in morphemes, in words or for age of the children?
>
> I know that this is a difficult question to solve and that many articles dealing with it have been written, but I would like to have also your opinion. Thank you very much,
>
> LAURA
> lauramingoia at tiscalinet.it
>