Establishing guidelines for MLU measurement in an agglutinating language: An illustration of Georgian

IF 1.2 2区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

First Language Pub Date : 2024-04-29 DOI:10.1177/01427237241247930

Tinatin Tchintcharauli, Nino Tsintsadze, Teona Damenia, Tamar Kalkhitashvili, Nino Doborjginidze, Sigal Uziel-Karl

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

This article explores the applicability of mean length of utterance (MLU) as a language assessment measure for Georgian child language, as to-date, Georgian, a morphologically rich language with numerous inflectional categories, experiences an extensive lack of instruments for early language assessment. To this end, a set of guidelines for calculating Georgian MLU was developed based on the analysis of a longitudinal corpus of two Georgian-speaking children aged 12–35 months. This was supported by the findings of previous studies on Georgian acquisition. Furthermore, the guidelines were used to compare MLU in morphemes (MLU-m) with MLU in words (MLU-w) and MLU in syllables (MLU-s) to determine the most suitable method for assessing morphological development in Georgian. These results indicate that MLU-m closely aligns with the description of language development in Georgian children. MLU-s is useful for demonstrating early linguistic development, while MLU-w correlates with age but does not capture changes within words over time. Further testing on a larger corpus is needed to refine the guidelines for more accurate assessment of Georgian-speaking children.

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为凝集语言的多语言单元测量制定准则：以格鲁吉亚语为例

格鲁吉亚语是一种语态丰富的语言，拥有众多变位类别，但迄今为止，格鲁吉亚语的早期语言评估工具十分匮乏，本文探讨了平均语篇长度（MLU）作为格鲁吉亚语儿童语言评估指标的适用性。为此，在对两个 12-35 个月的格鲁吉亚语儿童的纵向语料进行分析的基础上，制定了一套格鲁吉亚语 MLU 计算指南。这也得到了以往格鲁吉亚语习得研究结果的支持。此外，该指南还被用来比较词素的词素量（MLU-m）与词的词素量（MLU-w）和音节的词素量（MLU-s），以确定最适合评估格鲁吉亚语形态发展的方法。这些结果表明，MLU-m 与格鲁吉亚儿童语言发展的描述非常吻合。MLU-s 可用于展示早期语言发展，而 MLU-w 与年龄相关，但不能捕捉词内随时间发生的变化。需要在更大的语料库中进行进一步测试，以完善指南，对格鲁吉亚语儿童进行更准确的评估。

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来源期刊

First Language Multiple-

CiteScore

3.80

自引率

10.50%

发文量

期刊介绍： First Language is an international peer reviewed journal that publishes the highest quality original research in child language acquisition. Child language research is multidisciplinary and this is reflected in the contents of the journal: research from diverse theoretical and methodological traditions is welcome. Authors from a wide range of disciplines - including psychology, linguistics, anthropology, cognitive science, neuroscience, communication, sociology and education - are regularly represented in our pages. Empirical papers range from individual case studies, through experiments, observational/ naturalistic, analyses of CHILDES corpora, to parental surveys.