MLU in syllables?

Tue Sep 10 22:19:48 UTC 2013

Hi Yvan and all,

Thanks for your response and willingness to consider implementing something like this in Phon.

You're right that morpheme-based MLU makes most sense for Inuktitut, and I've already done that for my own child language corpus. But, as you point out, this involves first analyzing utterances morphologically - not a trivial task given the morphological complexity of Inuktitut. This would be fine for people with training in Inuktitut linguistics. But the people doing the language assessments are typically pediatricians or SLPs who speak little Inuktitut and rely on parental report, or native speaker medical assistants who do not have the requisite linguistic training (and anyway wouldn't have the time for morphological analysis). Thus, we need another solution.

Determining the number of syllables in an utterance is very doable for native speakers with no linguistic training, because Inuktitut is written in syllabic characters. So my plan is to calculate both the MLU in morphemes and the MLU in syllables on the data I already have, to see whether there is a high enough correlation between them. If the correlation is high enough, then it would be reasonable to use MLU in syllables as an indicator of linguistic ability for Inuktitut.

The data I have for now are already analyzed morphologically and I've calculated MLUs using CLAN. We've also figured out a way to do syllable counts that's workable for now. But if this idea works out and the correlation is high enough, we may well want to test it on more data that isn't coded. And then I'll definitely be in touch!

My request to info-childes was more to figure out if anyone has done something like calculating MLU in syllables before. If so, we could benefit from their experience and not reinvent the wheel. In this regard, thanks to Nan and Sarita for the references - very helpful.

Best,
Shanley.

On Sep 10, 2013, at 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
> 
> <Morpheme-basedMLU.png>
> 
> 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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