criteria of comparison

[Clifton Pye]

Comparing language acquisition across languages is impossible to do
directly. There are bound to be too many uncontrolled variables affecting
the measurement such as the average number of syllables and consonants in
the word or the variety of obligatory morphemes. Dan's idea of using
bilingual subjects is the best way to control for some of these variables as
long as the children are acquiring the languages simultaneously. Another
possibility is to adopt an mlu scale that is relative to the mlu of adults.
If adult speakers of a language have an average mlu of 8 and the child has
an mlu of 2, the mlu of the child relative to the adult would be 2/8 or .25.
Comparing relative mlus across English and Italian would show how far the
children had progressed toward the adult standard in each language.

Even relative mlu scales won't allow deep comparisons across languages since
languages emphasize their grammatical features in different ways. The
Sesotho use of passives in subject questions is a good example as are the
Korean locative verbs.

Clifton Pye
The University of Kansas

At 07:11 PM 12/16/2000 +0100, you 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