Mean Length of Utterance in Cypriot Greek-speaking Children

Abstract

While research undertaken worldwide indicates that mean length of utterance ( MLU ) is a valuable index in investigations of child language development, to date there have been no studies exploring MLU in pre-primary Cypriot Greek ( CYG )-speaking children. The participants in this study were 36 monolingual CYG -speaking children at ages 36, 40, 44 and 48 months, with a typical course of language development. The findings demonstrated that MLU counted in words ( MLU -w) of typically developing CYG -speaking children had a positive correlation with age (from 36 to 48 months) and a non-significant difference in MLU -w by gender at each age point, and that typically developing CYG -speaking children, for the age range studied, tended to produce more multiword utterance types. An outcome of this study is an MLU -w database which could be used, with some caution, in the language assessment of a similar population or as the basis for future studies. Areas for further research are identified.