Measures of Naturalistic Language for Dialect-Speaking Children: The Case of Cypriot Greek

Abstract

The aim of this study was to longitudinally examine mean length of utterance in words (MLU-w) and number of different words (NDW) and their association in children speaking Cypriot Greek (CG), a dialect for which such measures of language development have not been adequately investigated. Language samples from 36 typically developing monolingual CG-speaking children were collected at 4-month intervals from the age of 3;0 until 4;0 through free-play based conversation between the children and their caregivers. A zero-order correlation analysis among MLU-w, NDW, and age showed strong positive correlations between any two of these measures. A first-order analysis controlling for age showed that the correlation between MLU-w and NDW was independent from the influence of age. The study provides valuable information on the correlation between MLU-w and NDW for CG-speaking children and it contributes to our knowledge about language development in a dialectal variety lacking standardised tests.