MLU in characters?

Tue Jul 29 18:28:43 UTC 2025

Hi everyone,

Thank you for your ideas. The thought also crossed our mind to do the
manual version of inserting a space! We'll also look into WDLEN.

@Leonid Spektor <spektor at andrew.cmu.edu>, yes I think that would work for
our exploratory use case (comparing types, tokens, and MLU for English and
Spanish using morphemes, words, and characters). We are still in
early stages.

Would the +b option consider the same words and utterances that would be
counted with MLUw? Or would this disregard the MLU rules that are built in?

Janet

On Tue, Jul 29, 2025 at 11:01 AM Leonid Spektor <spektor at andrew.cmu.edu>
wrote:

> HI,
>
> It is easy to add an option to MLU to count characters over utterances.
> Currently MLU counts words or morphemes over utterances.
>
> Just to confirm I understand what you want. I will change +b option to
> count characters or words. In the case of counting characters each word
> will be used to count how many characters are in that word and the sum of
> all characters will be used to count MLU over utterances. Is this what you
> want?
>
> If it is, then I will put new version of CLAN on the web by the end of
> today.
>
>
> Leonid.
>
> On Jul 29, 2025, at 13:24, Nan Bernstein Ratner <nratner at umd.edu> wrote:
>
> Couldn't WDLEN do something in this regard? It counts characters...
>
> Nan Bernstein Ratner, F-, H-ASHA, F-AAAS, Board Certified Specialist in
> Stuttering, Cluttering, and Fluency Disorders
> she/her/hers
> Distinguished University Professor
> Hearing and Speech Sciences
> University of Maryland
> 0100 Lefrak Hall, 7251 Preinkert Drive
> College Park, MD 20742
> nratner at umd.edu, 301-405-4217   My Zoom <https://umd.zoom.us/j/7924324343>
> Co-director: FluencyBank (www.fluency.talkbank.org);
> http://languagefluency.umd.edu/
>
> Faculty, Language Science (languagescience.umd.edu; Neuroscience &
> Cognitive Neuroscience (NACS, nacs.umd.edu), Developmental Science Field
> Committee
>
> https://hesp.umd.edu/facultyprofile/bernstein-ratner/nan
>
>
> My PubMed bibliography:
> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/myncbi/1RORcBHUvuRQ82/bibliography/public/
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 29, 2025 at 11:27 AM Shanley <allen at rhrk.uni-kl.de> wrote:
>
>> 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>
>> 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> 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 | 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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-- 
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 | 408-924-3714
https://www.sjsu.edu/education/faculty/janet-bang.php

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