more thoughts on MLU

[Ginny Mueller Gathercole]

>How about this method:  You take the Bible in its various translations,
>morphemicize it, devise a counting system, compute Bible MLU and then
>compute corrected child MLU as the ratio of raw child MLU over Bible MLU.

Hi, Brian,

The Bible may not work for all languages.  An important case would be
Arabic.  First of all, the religious text is the Koran, which is
written in classical Arabic, not the vernacular.  So even getting MLU
counts from the Koran may not reflect the MLU counts in vernacular
speech of adults (whether adult-adult or adult-child).  It is
possible that there are translations of the Bible into Arabic, but
(apart from any concerns for cultural sensitivities in using the
Bible instead of the Koran) it is likely that such a translation
would still be written in classical Arabic, not the vernacular.

Ginny

--

Virginia C. Mueller Gathercole, Ph.D.
Reader

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