MLU, pronoun, deixis

Question 1

What is MLU?

Answer 1

A measurement of the child’s average utterance length, measured in number of morphemes

Question 2

Why is MLU useful?

Answer 2

useful predictor of language development, and correlates well with age.

Question 3

What do you count/ not count when calculating MLU?

Answer 3

DONT COUNT: dysfluencies, fillers

COUNT AS 1 MORPHEME:

• Recurrence/repeat of word (no! no! no!)
• Compound words (birthday)
• Reduplications (night-night)
• Irregular past tense / Irregular plurals (went, mice)
• Diminutives (doggie)
• Auxiliary verbs and catenatives (is, wanna, gonna, hafta)

COUNT AS 2 MORPHEME:

• Possessives, plurals (Sam’s, cats)
• 3rd person singular (she’s)
• regular past, -ing verbs (walks, walked, walking)

Question 4

How do you calculate MLU?

Answer 4

Add up all the morphemes lengths of each utterance

Divide by number of utterances

Needs 50-100 utterances

Question 5

Whats the average MLU per Brown’s stage?

Answer 5

STAGE I (12-26m)

• MLU: 1-2
• First 2 word utterences

STAGE II (27-30m)

• MLU: 2 - 2.5
• Mostly morphological development

STAGE III (31-34m)

• MLU: 2.5 - 3
• Different sentence forms begin to develop

STAGE IV (35-40m)

• MLU: 3 - 3.75
• Compound sentences begin to appear

STAGE V (41-46m)

• MLU: 3.75 - 4.5
• Complex sentences develop

Question 6

Why is learning pronouns a complex process?

Answer 6

A pronoun can stand in for one or several other words, and child has to work out these equivalences,
e.g. Granny’s arriving soon. Shall we go into the garden to see if we can see her coming?

Initial use is sporadic and in unanalysed forms,
e.g. stop it!

Question 7

As a group, how do children learn pronouns?

Answer 7

• Initial use is sporadic and in unanalysed forms: I, it
• subject pronouns learn first: he, she, they
• then object pronouns: him, her, them
• then possessive pronouns: his, her, hers, their, theirs
• finally around age 5, reflexive pronouns: himself, herself, themselves

Question 8

Stage 1 pronouns

Answer 8

12-26 months

I, it (Subject and object)

Question 9

Stage 2 pronouns

Answer 9

27-30

my, me mine, you

Question 10

Stage 3 pronouns

Answer 10

31-34

your, yours, he, she, we

Question 11

Stage 4 pronouns

Answer 11

35-40

they, them, us, her, hers, his

Question 12

Stage 5 pronouns

Answer 12

41-46

its, our, ours, their, theirs, him, her, myself, yourself

Question 13

Stage 5+ pronouns

Answer 13

47+

herself, himself, itself, ourselves, yourselves, themselves

Question 14

What is diexis?

Answer 14

Deixis: the process of using the speaker’s perspective as a reference.

Examples of deictic terms: this, that, here, there, me, you

At least one deictic term is normally present amongst child’s first 50 words

When do we use them?

• to direct attention
• to make spatial contrasts
• to denote times or participants in a conversation from the speaker’s point of view

Question 15

What are 3 problems of diectic terms acquisition?

Answer 15

• Point of reference
• Shifting reference
• Shifting boundaries

Question 16

How are deictic terms acquired?

Answer 16

Acquisition of this, that, here, there:

• Children initially use that and there for directing attention, as caregivers do, and with a point gesture.
• Then begin to also use this and here, but don’t use these terms correctly – don’t differentiate based on location of the object of interest (‘point of reference’)

Gradually, children realise that this and that, and here and there, denote contrast in location relative to the speaker.

And also that the referents for these words can change or move (‘shifting reference’) E.g. “put it there … no there”

However, they still experience difficulty with the actual size of the area covered by terms such as here. Contrast the meaning of here in:

• Put your cup here
• We play quietly here
• We’re all friends here (‘shifting boundaries’)