The Phonological Mean Length of Utterance: methodological challenges from a crosslinguistic perspective

Abstract

The present study assesses the phonological development of 17 children acquiring Finnish at the developmental point of 25 words (ages 1;2–2;0). The analysis is made using the PHONOLOGICAL MEAN LENGTH OF UTTERANCE (PMLU) method (Ingram & Ingram, 2001; Ingram, 2002), which focuses on the children's whole-word productions. Two separate analyses are carried out: the first analysis concentrates on consonants and follows the procedure devised by Ingram and Ingram (2001), and the second analysis also scores the correctness of vowels. The PMLU results of both analyses are found to be much higher than those reported for children acquiring English. The results show the apparent need for more language-specific research in order to develop the PMLU method suitable for various language environments.