A Study to Compare a Childs Mlu Within a Everyday Converstaion with a Parent/carer

Children learn to communicate with the external world from a very early age through many different interactions and reflexes. It is not until about 12 months old that a child begins to acquire and develop the use of language. As the child gets older their language develops at a faster pace obtaining and learning such skills like the use of morphemes which develop through the ages of around 18 months to 5-6 years old. (Brown 1973). In order to measure how a childs language is developing a widely used indication is Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) . MLU indicates how many morphemes a child can produce within a line of speech during a conversation (Hickey 1991) this score is usually calculated with the number of times the child responds in the converstaion which are often known as utterances. MLU can be an important guideline into how a childs language is developing and if it is doing so at the expected age it is therefore a good indicator of any linguistic problems a child may be struggling with and also reveal what stage a child is at linguistically quickly and efficently. ( Leonard 2000) .Many previous studies and experiments have researched the acqusition of language in children and a few in particular have found that the use of MLU is a good indicator of a childs verbal development for example a study carried out by Pratter and Swift in 1982 found