HOME HELP FEEDBACK SUBSCRIPTIONS ARCHIVE SEARCH TABLE OF CONTENTS		QUICK SEARCH:   [advanced] Author: Keyword(s): Year:  Vol:  Page:

This Article Full Text Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal My Folders Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via HighWire Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Rice, M. L. Articles by Hoffman, L. Search for Related Content PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Rice, M. L. Articles by Hoffman, L. Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

Mean Length of Utterance in Children With Specific Language Impairment and in Younger Control Children Shows Concurrent Validity and Stable and Parallel Growth Trajectories

Sean M. Redmond
University of Utah, Salt Lake City

Lesa Hoffman
Pennsylvania State University, State College

Contact author: Mabel L. Rice, 1000 Sunnyside Avenue, 3031 Dole Center, Child Language Doctoral Program, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045. E-mail: mabel{at}ku.edu

PURPOSE: Although mean length of utterance (MLU) is a useful benchmark in studies of children with specific language impairment (SLI), some empirical and interpretive issues are unresolved. The authors report on 2 studies examining, respectively, the concurrent validity and temporal stability of MLU equivalency between children with SLI and typically developing children.

METHOD: Study 1 used 124 archival conversational samples consisting of 39 children with SLI (age 5;0 [years;months]), 40 MLU-equivalent typically developing children (age 3;0), and 45 age-equivalent controls. Concurrent validity of MLU matches was examined by considering the correspondence between MLU and developmental sentence scoring (DSS), index of productive syntax (IPSyn), and MLU in words. Study 2 used 205 archival conversational samples, representing 5 years of longitudinal data collected on 20 children with SLI (from age 5;0) and 18 MLU matches (from age 3;0). Evaluation of growth dimensions within and across groups was carried out via growth-curve modeling.

RESULTS: In Study 1, high levels of correlation among the MLU, DSS, and IPSyn measures were observed. Differences between groups were not significant. In Study 2, temporal stability of MLU matches was robust over a 5 year period.

CONCLUSIONS: MLU appears to be a reliable and valid index of general language development and an appropriate grouping variable from age 3 to 10. The developmental stability of MLU matches is indicative of shared underlying growth mechanisms.

KEY WORDS: specific language impairment, mean length of utterance, vocabulary development, growth curves

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Facebook    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?

This article has been cited by other articles:

				M. L. Rice, C. L. Taylor, and S. R. Zubrick Language Outcomes of 7-Year-Old Children With or Without a History of Late Language Emergence at 24 Months J Speech Lang Hear Res, April 1, 2008; 51(2): 394 - 407. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				L. S. DeThorne, S. A. Petrill, S. A. Hart, R. W. Channell, R. J. Campbell, K. Deater-Deckard, L. A. Thompson, and D. J. Vandenbergh Genetic Effects on Children's Conversational Language Use J Speech Lang Hear Res, April 1, 2008; 51(2): 423 - 435. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				S. R. Zubrick, C. L. Taylor, M. L. Rice, and D. W. Slegers Late Language Emergence at 24 Months: An Epidemiological Study of Prevalence, Predictors, and Covariates J Speech Lang Hear Res, December 1, 2007; 50(6): 1562 - 1592. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				L. S. DeThorne and R. W. Channell Clinician-Child Interactions: Adjustments in Linguistic Complexity Am J Speech Lang Pathol, May 1, 2007; 16(2): 119 - 127. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]