title: Notes on Ingram's whole-word measures for phonological development.
abstract: In this note we discuss pMLU, a whole-word measure for phonological development that was proposed by Ingram (2002). Ingram's rules for calculating pMLU are analysed and we point at the crucial role of the level of transcription for making pMLU measurements comparable over different corpora. The main aim of the paper is an assessment of the reliability and the validity of pMLU. The assessment is accomplished using a computational tool for measuring pMLU on two large Dutch CHILDES corpora. We propose minimal sample sizes for reliable measurements relative to the stage of phonological development.
authors.affiliation: University of Antwerp, Dept. of Linguistics, CNTS, Universiteitsplein 1, B-2610 Wilrijk, Belgium. Helena.Taelman@ua.ac.be
authors.forename: Helena
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Taelman
authors.forename: Gert
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Durieux
authors.forename: Steven
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Gillis
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D001330:Electronic Data Processing; D006801:Humans; D007807:Language Tests; D008037:Linguistics / Q000379:methods*; D010700:Phonetics; D014706:Verbal Learning; D014825:Vocabulary