criteria of comparison

[Yonata Levy]

Similar issues need to be addressed when one tries to count MLU in Hebrew.
Dromi and Berman have proposed a system many years ago. In our studies we
have adopted much of what they propose but also changed it to some extent.
Here are some examples of what we do for Hebrew:
In view of the problems that Dan raised wrt determining productivity and
since morphemes are conflated and since the aim is to arrive at a measure
which will be comparable to other languages so that one can do
cross-linguistic studies the decision was to never give any single word more
than - 2. Furthermore, certain forms will never receive more than 1 because
they can be too easily picked out from the input. For example, the form that
the child is being addressed with. So a girl using an adjective in the
feminine will only get 1 for it. A boy will get 2. Nobody gets more than 1
for the canonical verb form (which in Hebrew is 3rd singular) etc. I believe
such decisions are needed, even if they seem ad hoc at times, since the aim
is to arrive at a reliable comparative measure.
Yonata.