MLU and comparison criteria

[Yonata Levy]

Well, this is where productivity comes in -- if there is evidence in the
corpus of the child using the pl. - I - on other nouns besides ragazzi then
you are safe, I think, assuming that he should be given credit for the pl.
ending. So, we in our coding make such decisions and often do not give
children credit for morphological markings which they produce rarely or
which are tied to specific words.
(and the same problem may come up with certain syntactic constructions that
are seen only once or twice). We also do not give credit for the use of the
form that the child is typically being addressed with - and the reasons are
the same, of course.
I remind you that in addition to Brown's 90% criterion of productivity there
also the other criteria of a feature used at least 3 times *in a different
context* within the same file. This might offer a solution in some cases.
Yonata.