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Characteristics Of Young Children's Longest Utterances, Alise R. Ranalli

Honors College

This paper reviews research on mean length of utterance (MLU) and longest length of utterance (LLU) as measures of child language development. Although there has been much research on MLU, there is some controversy as to its validity, especially across different data gathering procedures and clinical populations. In contrast, LLU has rarely been the focus of research, but the limited amount of information available indicates that it is a potentially useful way to analyze child speech. This study provides a detailed analysis of 1655 utterances from three children at ages 3;10, 4;1 and 4;4, and 2938 utterances from adults interacting …