MLU counts

[Yonata Levy]

Hi,
Concerning Nina and Kamil's suggestions -  I don't think verbs are theory
free - wouldn't you want to
take predicates rather than verbs? - but perhaps they are a good measure
nevertheless, given the inherent difficulties in all other measures.
In fact it seems that what we are looking for are domain general measures
such as
length or place holders (which should not be a trick that is unique to
language. On can conceive of other systems that require place holders for
awhile, until the child has acquired the correct feature. Drawing, reading
and writing and event recall are examples that come to mind). These domain
general measures that are accessible to the researchers should be highly
correlated with linguistic structure with the
latter being construed as descriptive, rather than theory dependent .  This
I think is somewhat different than thinking about MLU as language general
vs. langauge specific.
Yonata.