Affiliation:
1. University of Texas at Dallas
2. Harvard Graduate School of Education
Abstract
In the past decade the existence of individual differences in both rate and route of language development has been widely accepted. Some between-child differences are observed in the synchro nization of morphological with semantic skills. These differences are obscured by portmanteau measures like MLU. The purpose of this paper is to explore semantic and morphological predictors of MLU in order to identify individual variation in language development in a fairly large number of typically developing children. To accomplish this goal, we identified two additional variables: NPSAT, a measure of morphological skill, and MLU cw, a measure of utterance length in content words. A growth modelling strategy was used to identify both 'within-child' and 'between-child' differences in longitudinal data from 36 children. We found that typically developing children indeed use different strategies in lengthening their utterances. We therefore recommend caution in the use of MLU to 'language match' children when doing research on early language development.
Subject
Linguistics and Language,Education,Language and Linguistics
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