Mean Length of Utterance in Cypriot Greek-speaking Children

Abstract

While research undertaken worldwide indicates that mean length of utterance (MLU) is a valuable index in investigations of child language development, to date there have been no studies exploring MLU in pre-primary Cypriot Greek (CYG)-speaking children. The participants in this study were 36 monolingual CYG-speaking children at ages 36, 40, 44 and 48 months, with a typical course of language development. The findings demonstrated that MLU counted in words (MLU-w) of typically developing CYG-speaking children had a positive correlation with age (from 36 to 48 months) and a non-significant difference in MLU-w by gender at each age point, and that typically developing CYG-speaking children, for the age range studied, tended to produce more multiword utterance types. An outcome of this study is an MLU-w database which could be used, with some caution, in the language assessment of a similar population or as the basis for future studies. Areas for further research are identified.

Dynamic Linguistic Interconnectedness and Variability in Toddlers

“…Additional measures of language development, as well as analyses of specific language patterns and subsystems (e.g., phonological intelligibility) need to be employed in order to describe the linguistic profiles of children more accurately. For example, although in highly inflected languages the MLU in words is a more appropriate measure of syntactic and grammatical growth (Leonard 2014;Petinou and Spanoudis 2014;Voniati 2016) it remains a restricted measure in the sense that it fails to capture morphosyntactic and morphophonological growth. Consequently, statements regarding the developmental relationship between grammatical, phonological and semantic interdependencies can be made on general levels and conclusions cannot be drawn regarding aspects of specific growth effects among language subsystems and vice versa.…”

“…Since CG is a highly inflected linguistic variety, for the current investigation counting words rather than morphemes was considered to be the most appropriate method of data analysis. This regime has been used successfully by similar investigators with a focus on CG (Petinou and Spanoudis 2014;Voniati 2016). The counting of words as opposed to morphemes has been strongly recommended by Leonard (2014) in examining syntactic growth in children who speak a highly inflected language.…”

“…Even though developmental language research in CG has received remarkable attention during the past ten years (for a review see Grohmann 2011;Tsimpli et al 2016), the different linguistic skills have been examined independently. Studies on phonological development focused on the age and order of acquisition of different phonetic segments (for example Okalidou et al 2010;Petinou and Okalidou 2006;Petinou and Theodorou 2015), while studies on the development of syntax focused on MLU at different ages (for example Voniati 2016) or the acquisition of dialect-specific morphosyntactic elements (for example, Kambanaros et al 2013;Tsimpli et al 2016;Petinou and Terzi 2002). Finally, the development of the lexicon has recently been studied extensively through parental feedback on the CG CDI by Taxitari et al (2017).…”

Colorful Semantics in Cypriot-Greek-Speaking Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…The first phase comprised an initial assessment of the language skills of the 40 children by measuring their MLU and by administering the Greek Version of the Action Picture Test [62,63], an adaptation of the Renfrew Action Picture Test [64]. MLU was counted by totaling up the words in each of the 50 selected utterances and dividing the sum by the number 50 to obtain MLU in words [65]. The first 50 utterances which were linguistically fully processed by the children (and therefore were most representative of their language performance) were included in the analysis.…”

Lexical Diversity in Cypriot-Greek-Speaking Toddlers: A Preliminary Longitudinal Study

“…SMG is one of the two official languages of the Republic of Cyprus; it is used in formal settings and is learned mainly through schooling. To date, research on CYG acquisition is rather limited, with only a few studies examining quantitative measures of language development [59, 60]. Regarding lexical diversity measures in particular, and more specifically NDW, currently there exists no such standardized or formal measure for CYG.…”