different MLUs for different CLAN versions

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Bobbi,

    Thanks for the clear report on this.  The July version of CLAN was using the %mor line, so that cannot be the difference. I think this change is due to the treatment of fillers in MOR.  Before July, forms like "um" and "uh" were getting recognized as lexical items on the %mor line, but not the main line.  This was essentially a "bug" in the way MLU was working that resulted from the transition from computation from the main line to computation from the %mor line.   In order to fix this, I changed all of the "um" forms to "&um".   This then makes it so that they don't end up on the %mor line, which is the correct treatment.

-- Brian MacWhinney
On Sep 28, 2010, at 12:45 PM, RCorrigan wrote:

> For homework, I had-my Language Acquisition class compute a simple MLU
> on Adam's speech in adam01. I noticed that they were getting a
> different answer than I did. It turns out that I was using a July
> version of CLAN and they were using a September version.
> My output looked like this:
> 
> From file <adam01.cha>
> mlu +t*CHI adam01.cha
> Mon Sep 27 07:14:31 2010
> mlu (02-Jul-2010) is conducting analyses on:
>  ONLY speaker main tiers matching: *CHI;
> ****************************************
> From file <adam01.cha>
> MLU for Speaker: *CHI
>  MLU (xxx and yyy are EXCLUDED from the utterance and morpheme
> counts):
> 	Number of: utterances = 1232, morphemes = 2582
> 	Ratio of morphemes over utterances = 2.096
> 	Standard deviation = 1.024
> 
> Their output looked like this:
> mlu +t*chi adam01.cha
> Tue Sep 28 11:33:56 2010
> mlu (08-Sep-2010) is conducting analyses on:
>  ONLY dependent tiers matching: %MOR;
> ****************************************
> From file <adam01.cha>
> MLU for Speaker: *CHI
>  MLU (xxx and yyy are EXCLUDED from the utterance and morpheme
> counts):
> 	Number of: utterances = 1232, morphemes = 2644
> 	Ratio of morphemes over utterances = 2.146
> 	Standard deviation = 1.067
> 
> I know it's not a big difference, but why should MLUs change from one
> slight revision of CLAN to the next? The best I can figure, the July
> version must not have been calculating MLU on the %MOR line, but all
> the documentation for years has claimed it was.
> 
> In addition, the browsable database is using still a different July
> version and is giving a slightly different answers than the other two
> (both the utterance and morpheme counts are different on this one)
> 
> mlu +t*chi adam01.cha
> 
> Tue Sep 28 12:36:51 2010 mlu (10-Jun-2009) is conducting analyses on:
> ONLY speaker main tiers matching: *CHI;
> ****************************************
> From file "adam01.cha"
> MLU for Speaker: *CHI
> MLU (xxx and yyy are EXCLUDED from the utterance and morpheme counts):
> Number of: utterances = 1236, morphemes = 2582
> Ratio of morphemes over utterances = 2.089
> Standard deviation = 1.030
> 
> Thanks for letting me know what is going on.
> 
> Bobbi Corrigan
> 
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