A clinical protocol was developed for the purpose of assessing the oral and speech motor abilities of children. An 86-item test was administered to 90 normally developing children aged 2:6-6:11. Evaluations of the structural integrity of the vocal tract did not show developmental change, although evaluations of oral and speech motor functioning changed significantly with age. The functional portion of the protocol was most sensitive to developmental change up to age 3:6, with an asymptote in performance thereafter. Clinical application of the protocol is discussed.

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/ abstract_S0305000900006437 How to cite this article: Thomas Klee and Martha Deitz Fitzgerald (1985). The relation between grammatical development and mean length of utterance in ABSTRACT A widely held practice in many studies of child language development and disorders has been to employ an easily calculated numerical metric, mean length of utterance measured in morphemes (MLU), as a ' general index of grammatical development'. While this practice seems to have found acceptance among many students of child language, the usefulness of MLU past Stage II has been assumed but never empirically tested. This study evaluated the grammatical performance and MLU of 18 normally developing 2-and 3-year-old children and found that MLU did not correlate significantly with age (r -0-26), nor did it discriminate children's profiles of grammatical development.

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