Heather Brookes, Patricia Makaure, Sefela Yalala, Hannah Danvers, Martin Mössmer, Francesca Little, Mikateko Ndhambi, Frenette Southwood, Babalwa Ludidi
Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) has been widely used to measure children's early language development in a variety of languages. This study investigates the utility of MLU to measure language development in four agglutinative and morphologically complex Southern Bantu languages. Using a variant of MLU, MLU3, based on the three longest sentences children produced, we analysed the utterances of 448 toddlers (16-32 months) collected using the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory, a parent-report tool...
February 8, 2024: Journal of Child Language