more thoughts on MLU

[Yonata Levy]

Hi,
I too find MLU an interesting theoretical question however, there is the
practical problem too - until we figure out what MLU really is, what it
should correlate with, how it connects to variability in adult speech and to
language typology - all of which are fascinating issues! - we need a way to
calculate MLU in the morphologically rich languages that are currently under
study, that will enable comparability. I believe this is doable and it is
something that we need to provide our community with.
Yonata.
 ________________________

Prof. Yonata Levy
Psychology Department
The Hebrew University
Jerusalem, Israel 91905

Phone: 972-2-5883408 (o)      Fax:    972-2-5881159
            972-2-6424957 (h)      e-mail: msyonata at mscc.huji.ac.il


----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian MacWhinney" <macw at cmu.edu>
To: "Joseph Stemberger" <stemberg at interchange.ubc.ca>;
<info-childes at mail.talkbank.org>
Sent: Friday, February 20, 2004 5:14 AM
Subject: Re: more thoughts on MLU


> On 2/19/04 8:03 PM, "Joseph Stemberger" <stemberg at interchange.ubc.ca>
wrote:
>
> > Is there any way to take the differences in MLU in adult speech in
> > different languages, and create a way to adjust child MLU's to equate
> > for inherent differences between the languages?
> >
> Joe,
>
> How about this method:  You take the Bible in its various translations,
> morphemicize it, devise a counting system, compute Bible MLU and then
> compute corrected child MLU as the ratio of raw child MLU over Bible MLU.
>
> Since you would have a complete morphemicization of both your child
corpora
> and the Bible, you could just vary strings in CLAN or run global
> replacements, as I suggested in my earlier message.  Using this method you
> can compute Brown MLU, Peters MLU, Stemberger-cautious MLU,
> Stemberger-Radical MLU, dual-system MLU, and whatever.  For each, you
would
> correct by the Bible using the matching system.
>
> However, the real proof of the pudding is whether MLU predicts anything.
I
> think that, despite many papers to the contrary in books on developmental
> methodology, the obvious candidate is age (across some large sample, of
> course).  For me, the MLU measure that correlates best with age is the
best
> language-internal MLU measure.  What would be really neat is getting a
> Bible-corrected MLU that ended up not only predicting age within the
> language, but which yields corrected values that actually look similar
> cross-linguistically.
>
> However, as Yonata noted in an offline message to me, all of this becomes
> impossible if you have to do hand computation of morphemes.  It only works
> if you have automatic morphological analysis as we now have for English,
> Japanese, and Spanish.  (Cantonese, Italian, and French are still not good
> enough for this).  Oh, yes, one other thing is that you would have to add
a
> bunch of rather strange words for Bible, such as "gnash" and "disciple",
> probably sticking with the New Testament.
>
> --Brian
>
>