Voor Childes

[Alex HOUSEN]

Dear listmembers,

We have collected oral Frogstory retell data in both Dutch and French from
Dutch-speaking and French-speaking children (three different age/grade
levels) in an immersion context in Brussels, Belgium.  Monolingual Dutch and
French-speakers serve as comparisons.  We are looking for linguistic
measures on which we can compare the different groups in our study.  One
fairly simple measure would be "text length" (measured in terms of, for
instance, number of words, syllables or morph(eme)s).
Does anyone know where we can find information about the validity (or lack
thereof) of "text length" as a diagnostic of overall productive language
proficiency (or of more specific components thereof; e.g. fluency,
complexity, richness, ...)?


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Alex HOUSEN
Dept. of Germanic Languages
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium
Tel: +32-2-629 38 84
Fax: +32-2-629 36 84
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