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Related Experiment Videos

Grammatical morpheme effects on MLU: "the same can be less" revisited.

Laurence B Leonard1, Denise Finneran

  • 1Department of Audiology and Speech Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA. xdxl@purdue.edu

Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research : JSLHR
|September 10, 2003
PubMed
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Children with specific language impairment (SLI) may not always show language deficits compared to typically developing peers matched for mean length of utterance (MLU). This is because MLU matching can mask other language skill differences.

Area of Science:

  • Child language development
  • Linguistic pathology
  • Developmental psychology

Background:

  • Studies on specific language impairment (SLI) often use age-matched and mean length of utterance (MLU)-matched typically developing children as controls.
  • Grammatical morpheme use is a common dependent measure, but it is correlated with utterance length.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether specific language impairment (SLI) in children is masked by mean length of utterance (MLU) matching.
  • To examine the necessity of "offsetting effects" in language development research.

Main Methods:

  • The study involved two experiments comparing children with SLI to typically developing children.
  • Analysis focused on grammatical morpheme use and other linguistic features in relation to MLU.

Related Experiment Videos

Main Results:

  • Children with SLI did not necessarily show deficits across all linguistic measures when compared to MLU-matched peers.
  • The study demonstrated that MLU matching can obscure differences in specific language skills.
  • Offsetting effects, where a deficit in one area is compensated by a strength in another, are not always required in MLU-matched comparisons.

Conclusions:

  • Mean length of utterance (MLU) matching in specific language impairment (SLI) research may not accurately reflect a child's overall language abilities.
  • Researchers should consider alternative matching methods or a broader range of linguistic measures to avoid masking true SLI characteristics.
  • The findings challenge the assumption that MLU-matched controls always provide a valid comparison group for SLI studies.