Description of the child and the context
The subject of our mean length utterance study is A.N., a four year old Caucasian female. A.N. is the firstborn child in a family of four, living with both of her parents and a younger sister about 8 months old. Since she lives in a dormitory, as her parents are Resident Heads, she interacts with college students on a regular basis, which may contribute to accelerated language acquisition, in terms of her increased exposure to vocabulary.
On the day of the study, A.N. was returning from church with her father and was excited to go to the Navy Pier Winter Wonderfest later that Sunday. Although she initially had a heightened awareness of being recorded and a subsequent hesitance to produce speech, A.N.’s …show more content…
A.N. demonstrated that she knows the phrases “going to” and “get to” when she stated “I’m going to go” to her father and when she stated “get to go again” during the memory game and “We both get to have two chances for the goal” while playing soccer. She also demonstrated that she knows that “wanna” designates “want to” when stating “I wanted to get the tweetybird again.” In contrast, we did not count “lemme” as two morphemes since she did not use the words “let me” in regular speech; she used the word “let” separately while reading Stellaluna, but her reading was not counted towards the MLU since it was not naturalistic speech. She may not have understood the meaning of what she was …show more content…
When the utterances from the reading activity are disregarded since they are not quite as representative of her naturalistic speech, A.N.’s MLU is 3.99 (1156 morphemes / 290 utterances). Instead of calculating the MLU for all of the recorded utterances, if we choose to calculate it for just the first 100 utterances, the MLU is 4.2, which seems to better represent A.N.’s level of speech. A.N. is capable of producing very complex utterances in naturalistic speech, since her upper length of utterance is 24 morphemes, when she states the following in a continuous stream: “We if you get a match you get to go again, then if you get another match you get to go again and again.” The MLU is probably lower for 290 utterances than for the first 100 due to A.N.’s occasional one-word responses to her father’s questions. Since her words per utterance are different from her morphemes per utterance, it would be interesting to consider if her words per utterance reflect her use of phrases and embedded clauses more
The subject of our mean length utterance study is A.N., a four year old Caucasian female. A.N. is the firstborn child in a family of four, living with both of her parents and a younger sister about 8 months old. Since she lives in a dormitory, as her parents are Resident Heads, she interacts with college students on a regular basis, which may contribute to accelerated language acquisition, in terms of her increased exposure to vocabulary.
On the day of the study, A.N. was returning from church with her father and was excited to go to the Navy Pier Winter Wonderfest later that Sunday. Although she initially had a heightened awareness of being recorded and a subsequent hesitance to produce speech, A.N.’s …show more content…
A.N. demonstrated that she knows the phrases “going to” and “get to” when she stated “I’m going to go” to her father and when she stated “get to go again” during the memory game and “We both get to have two chances for the goal” while playing soccer. She also demonstrated that she knows that “wanna” designates “want to” when stating “I wanted to get the tweetybird again.” In contrast, we did not count “lemme” as two morphemes since she did not use the words “let me” in regular speech; she used the word “let” separately while reading Stellaluna, but her reading was not counted towards the MLU since it was not naturalistic speech. She may not have understood the meaning of what she was …show more content…
When the utterances from the reading activity are disregarded since they are not quite as representative of her naturalistic speech, A.N.’s MLU is 3.99 (1156 morphemes / 290 utterances). Instead of calculating the MLU for all of the recorded utterances, if we choose to calculate it for just the first 100 utterances, the MLU is 4.2, which seems to better represent A.N.’s level of speech. A.N. is capable of producing very complex utterances in naturalistic speech, since her upper length of utterance is 24 morphemes, when she states the following in a continuous stream: “We if you get a match you get to go again, then if you get another match you get to go again and again.” The MLU is probably lower for 290 utterances than for the first 100 due to A.N.’s occasional one-word responses to her father’s questions. Since her words per utterance are different from her morphemes per utterance, it would be interesting to consider if her words per utterance reflect her use of phrases and embedded clauses more