Child gender has been proved to affect toddlers'/children's language development in several studies, but its effect was not found to be stable across different ages or various aspects of language ability. The effect of gender on toddler's, children's and adolescents' language ability was examined in the present meta-analysis of ten Slovenian…

This study explores the developmental change of mother-child interactions in order to investigate which aspects of maternal behavior affect children's speech production. To this end, the interactions between 79 German-speaking mothers and their two- or five-year-old children were observed at two time points (12 months apart) and in two interactive…

This study examines the morphosyntactic development, specifically verb morphology, of typically-developing Bangla-speaking children between the ages of two and four. Three verb forms were studied: the Present Simple, the Present Progressive and the Past Progressive. The study was motivated by the observations that reliable language-specific…

Purpose: The current study used an intervention design to test the hypothesis that parent input sentences with diverse lexical noun phrase (NP) subjects would accelerate growth in children's sentence diversity. Method: Child growth in third person sentence diversity was modeled from 21-30 months (n = 38) in conversational language samples obtained…

The purpose of this study was to compare early speech and language development of children with and without cleft lip and/or palate (CLP) in the US and Slovakia from 6 to 24 months of age. Thirty-two children from the US (eight with CLP and eight noncleft) and Slovakia (eight with CLP and eight noncleft) participated in this study. The children…

This study applies the Phonological Mean Length of Utterance measurement (PMLU; Ingram & Ingram, 2001; Ingram, 2002) to the data of five children acquiring Finnish and evaluates their phonological development longitudinally at four different age points: 2;0, 2;6, 3;0, and 3;6. The children's results on PMLU and related measures are discussed…

A group of preschool-aged children with specific language impairment (SLI), a group of typically developing children matched for age (TD-A), and a group of younger typically developing children matched for mean length of utterance (TD-MLU) were presented with novel verbs in contexts that required them to inflect with past tense "-ed."…

Two studies of children's conversational language abilities are reported. In the first, mean length of utterance (MLU) and lexical diversity (D) were examined in a group of typically developing Cantonese-speaking children in Hong Kong. Regression analyses indicated a significant linear relationship between MLU and age (R = .44) and a significant…

A cross-sectional research study and a longitudinal research study failed to replicate previous research findings that indicated a linear relationship between age and mean length of utterance during the preschool years. Instead, a deceleration in age curves, particularly beyond about 36 months, was observed in each sample. (Author/CB)

Longitudinal studies of the application of a paraphrasing model to 18- to 28-month-olds indicated that mean length of utterance was significantly correlated with realized and paraphrased frequencies of several linguistic items in the subjects' corpora. The model was productive for examining children's corpora of speech and the linguistic…

Examines speech samples from six children aged 2 years to 2 years, 5 months, with Mean Lengths of Utterance ranging from 2.93 to 4.14, were examined for evidence of six syntactic categories: determiner, adjective, noun, noun phrase, preposition, and prepositional phrase. (HOD)

To test D. Stampe's hypothesis about the development of phonological processes, 60 children (21 to 48 months old) were placed into groups based on mean length of utterance (MLU) and chronological age. MLU was found to be the best classification for describing the phonological processes. (Author/SEW)

The use of observation of natural language interaction as a measure of language proficiency and the impact of discourse characteristics on children's use of Spanish and English as measured by length of utterances are examined. The goal of this observational approach to measuring language proficiency is to distinguish between the effects of change…

Dialogue from 30-minute samples from "Sesame Street" and "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" was coded for grammar, content, and discourse. Grammatical analysis used the LINGQUEST computer-assisted language assessment program (Mordecai, Palen, and Palmer 1982). Content coding was based on categories developed by Rice (1984) and…

The variation of mean length of utterance, a linguistic measure, is explored among 50 normally developing three-, four-, and five-year-olds. It is suggested that mean length of utterance, as a measure of language status, is limited in differentiating language-impaired from normally developing children. (Author/SJL)