MLU in characters?

[Shanley]

The poor person’s workaround - you could tweak the system by just making each character into a word - i.e. by putting a space between every character on whatever tier you’re using to count MLU. Surely a python script could easily do this for you.

Or a more complicated variant would be to write a python script to calculate what you want from the existing file.

In both cases, you should of course take Leonid’s observation below into account - that you’d need to first decide which words/utterances should be included.

Best,
Shanley Allen.



> On 25. Jul 2025, at 15:15, 'Janet Bang' via chibolts <chibolts at googlegroups.com> wrote:
> 
> Got it, thank you!
> 
> On Fri, Jul 25, 2025 at 12:12 PM Leonid Spektor <spektor at andrew.cmu.edu <mailto:spektor at andrew.cmu.edu>> wrote:
>> Janet,
>> 
>> 	I am sorry to say it, but MLU can only count words or morphemes.
>> 
>> If you plan to use another program, then please keep in mind that MLU uses a lot of rules to decide if utterance or word(s) should be counted. You can read those rule in CLAN manual at https://talkbank.org/0info/manuals/CLAN.pdf. Please look for chapter "7.19" MLU in the manual.
>> 
>> 
>> Leonid.
>> 
>>> On Jul 25, 2025, at 14:53, 'Janet Bang' via chibolts <chibolts at googlegroups.com <mailto:chibolts at googlegroups.com>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hello!
>>> 
>>> Is there a way to use the MLU program to extract MLU in characters? We are exploring measures to facilitate cross-linguistic comparisons between English and Spanish and someone had recommended using characters (over MLU words) given the orthographic transparency of Spanish. 
>>> 
>>> We saw some other programs on github, but I was hoping there was something within CLAN because we had already used MOR within CLAN.
>>> 
>>> Thanks, 
>>> Janet
>>> 
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> -- 
> Janet Y. Bang, Ph.D (she/her/hers)
> Assistant Professor
> Child and Adolescent Development
> Lurie College of Education, San José State University
> janet.bang at sjsu.edu <mailto:janet.bang at sjsu.edu> | 408-924-3714
> https://www.sjsu.edu/education/faculty/janet-bang.php
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********************************************************************************
Prof. Dr. Shanley E. M. Allen
Director, Psycholinguistics and Language Development Group
Center for Cognitive Science
University of Kaiserslautern-Landau
Erwin-Schrödinger-Straße 57/409
67663 Kaiserslautern
Germany

e-mail: allen at rptu.de
phone: +49-631-205-4136
fax: +49-631-205-5182
office: Building 57, Office 409
web: http://www.sowi.uni-kl.de/psycholinguistics/home/
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