Procedures for Determining the Mean Length of Utterance

One the language sample is transcribed, you are ready to calculate your clients MLU. The first
step is counting the morphemes in each utterance. Lund and Duchan (1993) outline specific dos
and donts for computing mean length of utterance.1
Exclude from your count:

Imitations which immediately follow the model utterance and which give the impression
that the child would not have said the utterance spontaneously.
Elliptical answers to questions which give the impression that the utterance would have
been more complete if there had been no eliciting question (e.g., Do you want this?
Yes. What do you have? My dolls).
Partial utterances which are interrupted by outside events or shifts in the childs focus
(e.g., Thats myoops).
Unintelligible utterances, that contain unintelligible segments. If a major portion of a
childs sample is unintelligible, a syllable count by utterance can be substituted for
morpheme count.
Rote passages such as nursery rhymes, songs, or prose passages which have been
memorized and which may not be fully processed linguistically by the child.
False starts and reformulations within utterances which may either be self-repetitions or
changes in the original formulation (e.g., I have one [just like] almost like that; ([We]
we cant).
Noises unless they are integrated into meaningful verbal materials such as He went xx.
Discourse markers such as um, oh, you know not integrated into the meaning of the
utterance (e.g., [Well] it was [you know] [like] a party or something).
Identical utterances that the child says anywhere in the sample. Only one occurrence of
each utterance is counted. If there is even a minor change, however, the second utterance
is also counted.
Counting or other sequences of enumeration (e.g., blue, green, yellow, red, purple).
Single words or phrases such as hi, thank you, here, know what?

Count as one morpheme:

Uninflected lexical morphemes (e.g., run, fall) and grammatical morphemes that are
whole words (articles, auxiliary verbs, prepositions).
Contractions when individual segments do not occur elsewhere in the sample apart from
the contraction. If either of the constituent parts of the contraction are found elsewhere,
the contraction is counted as two rather than one morpheme (e.g., Ill, its, cant).
Catentatives such as wanna, gonna, hafta and the infinitive models that have the same
meanings (e.g., going to go). This eliminates the problem of judging a morpheme count
on the basis of the childs pronunciation. Thus am gonna is counted as two morphemes.

From N. Lund and J. Duchan, Assessing Childrens Language in Naturalistic Contexts, 3rd ed., 1993, pp. 205206. Adapted by permission of Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.

Phrases, compound words, diminutives, reduplicated words which occur as inseparable

linguistic units for the child or represent single items (e.g., oh boy; all right; once upon a
time; a lot of; lets; big wheel; horsie).
Irregular past tense. The convention is to count these as single morphemes because
childrens first meanings for them seem to be distinct from the present tense counterparts
(e.g., did, was).
Plurals which do not occur in singular form (e.g., pants; clothes), including plural
pronouns (us; them).
Gerunds and participles that are not part of the verb phrase (Swimming is fun; He was
tired; That is the cooking place).

Count as more than one morpheme:

Inflected forms: regular and irregular plural nouns; possessive noun; third person singular
verb; present participle and past participle when part of the verb phrase; regular past tense
verb; reflexive pronoun; comparative and superlative adverbs and adjectives.
Contractions when one or both of the individual segments occur separately any-where in
the childs sample (e.g., Its if it or is occurs elsewhere).

After you have counted all the morphemes, you are already to calculate the MLU. The traditional
method of calculating MLU is dividing the number of morphemes by the number of utterances.
For example:
150 morphemes
= 3.0 MLU
50 utterances
Many clinicians also calculate the MLU for words by dividing the number of words by the
number of utterances. This calculation does not reflect the use of bound morphemes (e.g., -ing, ed, -s, etc.); therefore, the MLU for words will always be equal to or smaller than the MLU for
morphemes. For example, the same 100-word sample might have:
100 words
=2.0 MLU-words
50 utterances
120 morphemes
=2.4 MLU-morphemes
50 utterances
MLU is a gross but reasonably accurate index of grammatical development up to four-to-five
morphemes (Brown 1973; James, 1993). It is considered gross because the MLU is a
General measure which tells us nothing about specific forms or structures used. However, the use
of both free and bound morphemes is needed for utterance lengths to increase.