MLU and comparison criteria

[Edy Veneziano]

Indeed this is a crucial point that requires fine analytical tools to be
answered.
And to my mind, depending on developmental level, the answer might be only
probabilistic rather than definite
(rules of the thumb like those mentioned by Yonata help to go on but do not solve
the basic issues).
One of the things that I think should be avoided is to consider productions in
isolation, something that unfortunately may occur with online ways of coding.

One bit of evidence that might be used more widely consists in looking for
morphologically relevant variation in one and the same type of word, although
also this is not bullet-proof because each one of the items could be learned as a
separate entry. However, considerations of the overall trend in the child's
production might provide a further crucial hint.
A more encompassing system approach to the analysis of children's productions
might be a revealing useful tool in this thorny domain.

Edy



Annette Karmiloff-Smith wrote:

> The problem that remains for me mentioned by Ann Peters "at least for adults".
> Surely MLU calculations are an attempt to get at what the linguistic
> representations
> are "for the child".  So, it could be that raggazzi is a plural for
> the child of raggazzo
> and that "for the child" there is a representational relationship
> between the two,
> but it could be that the child has learnt "raggazzi" as an unanalyzed
> whole linked to a
> specific context.  In other words, the child could be matching the
> phonology rather than
> the morphology.  I have no solution except there may be clauses in
> intonation  or the
> rest of each child's particular productions, etc., but the problem is
> real in my view,
> and may be more so for highly agglutinating languages.
> Annette
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