MLU in syllables?

[Yvan Rose]

Dear Shanley, everyone,
MLU counts by syllables would potentially work for Inuktitut. However, I wonder whether a morpheme count wouldn't work even better, closer to the original spirit of MLUs, as the syllable count would elude anything meaning-related.

Building on Nan's suggestion, I confirm that we could easily rig both a syllabification algorithm (for Inuktitut), and a (general-purpose) syllable-based MLU count in Phon. I would be happy to work with you towards both objectives. This also raises the question of converting your data into the Phon format, something that shouldn't pose any serious problem either given our advances on this front over the last year. 

A morpheme-based one would require the utterances to be morphologically analyzed first. We did this for Cree a few years ago. Attached is a screen shot illustrating this. Please feel free to contact me separately to discuss the specifics.

Best regards,
Yvan



On 2013-09-09, at 22:12, Nan Bernstein Ratner <nratner at umd.edu> wrote:

> 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] On Behalf Of Shanley Allen
> Sent: Monday, September 09, 2013 5:25 PM
> To: 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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