MLU in syllables?

Katherine Demuth kdemuth07 at gmail.com
Tue Sep 10 14:02:23 UTC 2013 

We've also morphologized Sesotho - also on the CHILDES database.

And Kamil Ud Deen used an 'MLU' criteria for Swahili  - number of 
morphemes per verb, that works well across Bantu languages, and might 
for other morphologically rich null subject (and object) languages.

KD






On 10/09/13 1:11 PM, Yvan Rose wrote:
> 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 
> <mailto: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>[mailto:info-childes at googlegroups.com 
>> <mailto:childes at googlegroups.com>]*On Behalf Of*Shanley Allen
>> *Sent:*Monday, September 09, 2013 6:04 PM
>> *To:*info-childes at googlegroups.com <mailto: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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