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The Phonological Mean Length of Utterance: methodological challenges from a crosslinguistic perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 February 2006

KATRI SAARISTO-HELIN ,
TUULA SAVINAINEN-MAKKONEN  and
SARI KUNNARI
KATRI SAARISTO-HELIN
Affiliation:
University of Helsinki
TUULA SAVINAINEN-MAKKONEN
Affiliation:
University of Helsinki
SARI KUNNARI
Affiliation:
University of Oulu
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Abstract

The present study assesses the phonological development of 17 children acquiring Finnish at the developmental point of 25 words (ages 1;2–2;0). The analysis is made using the PHONOLOGICAL MEAN LENGTH OF UTTERANCE (PMLU) method (Ingram & Ingram, 2001; Ingram, 2002), which focuses on the children's whole-word productions. Two separate analyses are carried out: the first analysis concentrates on consonants and follows the procedure devised by Ingram and Ingram (2001), and the second analysis also scores the correctness of vowels. The PMLU results of both analyses are found to be much higher than those reported for children acquiring English. The results show the apparent need for more language-specific research in order to develop the PMLU method suitable for various language environments.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , February 2006 , pp. 179 - 190
Copyright
© 2006 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This research and the preparation of the manuscript were supported by grants from the Emil Aaltonen Foundation received by the first and second authors and by the University of Oulu. The writers would like to thank Professor Antti Iivonen and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.