MLUm & MLUw: summary of responses

[Catherine Snow]

> A quick postscript to Liz Bates' contribution concerning MLU:  in a
> paper that appeared in First Lanugage in 1996, Pam Rollins, John
> Willett and I reported a similar analysis of MLU within English
> speakers (Predictors of MLU: Lexical versus morphological
> developments.  First Language, 16, 243-259, 1996). Some children
> produce an MLU of 2.0 using almost exclusively content words, whereas
> others who look identical on the portmanteau measure have much more
> morphology.  Of course, the relative poverty of the English
> morphological system limits the total possible contribution of
> morphological complexity more than in Italian.
>
> So it seems that the value of MLU as a very general index of language
> development may reflect, to some extent, its insensitivity to various
> component processes.
>
> And a bibliographical postscript as well:
> Arlman-Rupp, A., van Niekerk de Haan, D., and van de
> Sandt-Koenderman, M.  (1976).  Brown's early stages: Some evidence
> from Dutch.  Journal of Child Language, 3, 267-274.  Correlations
> between MLU in morphemes, in words, and in syllables are reported for
> four children Dutch-speaking children observed five times each.  The
> MLU-m to MLU-syllables correlations ranged from .91 to .99.  The
> MLU-m to MLU-word correlations ranged from .98 to .99.
>
> ----------------------------------------
> Catherine Snow
> Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education
> Harvard Graduate School of Education
> Larsen 3
> Cambridge, MA 02138
> tel:  617 - 495 3563
> fax:  617 - 495 5771
> New email address: Snowcat at gse.harvard.edu
>                or: Catherine_Snow at harvard.edu
>
>
>

----------------------------------------
Catherine Snow
Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education
Harvard Graduate School of Education
Larsen 3
Cambridge, MA 02138
tel:  617 - 495 3563
fax:  617 - 495 5771
New email address: Snowcat at gse.harvard.edu
               or: Catherine_Snow at harvard.edu