MLU in syllables?

[Nan Bernstein Ratner]

OK, then, pragmatic issues satisfied, Shelley Brundage and I tried this a while back for English and came up with a conversion factor of about 1.5 for American English speaking kids' speech from about 3-8 (JFD, 1989). But you are asking about norms? Because you seem to have identified that the conversion is closer to 1:1 for Inuktitut. This seems to be a question Phon users might be able to compute for longitudinal samples in the database. I guess Brian could say whether any dataset in TalkBank is pre-syllabified. If so, one could theoretically do this on archival data.

Best regards to all,
Nan

From: info-childes at googlegroups.com [mailto:info-childes at googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Shanley Allen
Sent: Monday, September 09, 2013 6:04 PM
To: info-childes at googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: MLU in syllables?

No, it's a good question. I wouldn't try this for English, but it makes sense for Inuktitut because Inuktitut is written with a syllabic script. So anyone who writes Inuktitut (98% literacy rate!) is forced to think in syllables, and native speakers of Inuktitut who are assisting in the assessment can easily transcribe the child's speech in syllabics and then simply count the number of characters in each utterance. Those same native speakers would have a very hard time dividing Inuktitut into morphemes to calculate a traditional MLU. And assessing MLU in words (as is done for Irish, for example) is uninformative for Inuktitut because it is polysynthetic and has rampant argument ellipsis so all the interesting linguistic development at early ages happens in the morphology.
Shanley.


On Sep 9, 2013, at 11:48 PM, Nan Bernstein Ratner wrote:


This may seem like a stupid question, but do pediatricians know what a syllable is? My spouse, who is a doctor, probably would prefer something based on a literate unit, like words. I am afraid to ask what he thinks about counting syllables in any language, but I will go home tonight and ask.
Nan Bernstein Ratner

-----Original Message-----
From: info-childes at googlegroups.com<mailto:info-childes at googlegroups.com> [mailto:info-childes at googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Shanley Allen
Sent: Monday, September 09, 2013 5:25 PM
To: info-childes at googlegroups.com<mailto:info-childes at googlegroups.com>
Subject: MLU in syllables?

I'm wondering if anyone has tried to calculate MLU in syllables for any language, or knows of any study like this. I'm working with an SLP colleague to devise tests that would be suitable for assessing language delay in Inuktitut. The target user group is pediatricians who don't know Inuktitut well enough to do a morphological analysis, but want to use measures that are appropriate for the language. This idea seems a little crazy, but our preliminary results show that MLU in syllables correlates very highly with MLU in morphemes in Inuktitut data, so it might just work.

Thanks in advance,
Shanley Allen.
Shanley Allen
Professor, Psycholinguistics and Language Development
Dept. of Social Sciences, University of Kaiserslautern
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