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Utterance length as a measure of language development

Linguistic development, and particularly stage of development, is most commonly expressed with respect to the length of utterance by using Brown’s (1973) MLU measure or a variation of it (for example, Miller 1982). Not much attention, however, has been paid to how good an indication of development these measures actually provide, or how sensitive they are to the children’s general language development, or with respect to their development on specific parts of the linguistic system. This project used over 120 hours of recorded speech samples collected from nine children over the age range of about one to three-and-a-half years. A demonstration of large variations between the children’s apparent linguistic abilities at similar utterance lengths and differences between individual children’s development of particular systems indicates that utterance length is not a very good indicator of developmental level. The length of