MLU counts

[Joko Kusmanto Damanhuri]

dear all,

Thank to Nina Hyams for raising this issue here and all who have made the
contribution on this issue. I also have had problems with MLU to measure
the acquisition of Indonesian, particularly pertaining to the acquisition
of verbal affixation.

Then, I tried to take a look at Predominant Lenght of Utterance (PLU)which
is said to be more flexible. I like to know what you all think about PLU.
Which one can work across languages? This is one of papers on PLU that I
found at www.cog.jhu.edu/faculty/legendre/papers/techreport-mlu.pdf and I
quote the abstract.

Best,
Joko K. Damanhuri

PLU-Stages: An Independent Measure of Early Syntactic Development
ABSTRACT
This paper describes a new method for determining early syntactic stages.
The method is related to the traditional notion of MLU (Mean Length of
Utterance), and relies on the traditional idea of a one-word stage, a
two-word stage, and a multiword stage. At each stage, the predominant
length of utterance is determined, resulting in our PLU-stages
(Predominant Length of Utterance). The proposed method reflects our best
attempt to construct a standard of early syntactic development that is
independent of the child’s age, and is also independent of any particular
syntactic construction. Such an independent measure should facilitate
comparison of naturalistic data across children within the same language,
as well as comparison of data across languages. The measure we have
developed does indeed show promise in cross-linguistic comparison of
syntactic development for languages such as French, Swedish, English,
Polish and Russian.