Affiliation:
1. University of Kansas, Lawrence
2. University of Utah, Salt Lake City
3. Pennsylvania State University, State College
Abstract
Purpose
Although mean length of utterance (MLU) is a useful benchmark in studies of children with specific language impairment (SLI), some empirical and interpretive issues are unresolved. The authors report on 2 studies examining, respectively, the concurrent validity and temporal stability of MLU equivalency between children with SLI and typically developing children.
Method
Study 1 used 124 archival conversational samples consisting of 39 children with SLI (age 5;0 [years;months]), 40 MLU-equivalent typically developing children (age 3;0), and 45 age-equivalent controls. Concurrent validity of MLU matches was examined by considering the correspondence between MLU and developmental sentence scoring (DSS), index of productive syntax (IPSyn), and MLU in words. Study 2 used 205 archival conversational samples, representing 5 years of longitudinal data collected on 20 children with SLI (from age 5;0) and 18 MLU matches (from age 3;0). Evaluation of growth dimensions within and across groups was carried out via growth-curve modeling.
Results
In Study 1, high levels of correlation among the MLU, DSS, and IPSyn measures were observed. Differences between groups were not significant. In Study 2, temporal stability of MLU matches was robust over a 5 year period.
Conclusions
MLU appears to be a reliable and valid index of general language development and an appropriate grouping variable from age 3 to 10. The developmental stability of MLU matches is indicative of shared underlying growth mechanisms.
Publisher
American Speech Language Hearing Association
Subject
Speech and Hearing,Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics
Cited by
140 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献
1. Measuring Linguistic Growth in Sentence-Level Writing Curriculum-Based Measures: Exploring Complementary Scoring Methods;Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools;2024-01-29
2. Spanish Bilingual Morphosyntactic Development in Bilingual Children With and Without Developmental Language Disorder: Articles, Clitics, Verbs, and the Subjunctive Mood;Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research;2023-12-11
3. The relationship between mean length of utterance (MLU), Persian developmental sentence score (PDSS), and photographic expressive Persian grammar test (PEGT) in typically developing children and those with developmental language disorder (DLD);Applied Neuropsychology: Child;2023-09-04
4. Longitudinal Examination of Morphosyntactic Skills in Bilingual Children: Spanish and English Standardized Scores;Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research;2023-08-03
5. Verb agreement production in Arabic-speaking children with developmental language disorder;Language Acquisition;2023-07-20