Record enough natural speech to yield at least one hundred consecutive
utterances after stages 2 to 3
Transcribe the speech.
Eliminate:
— all utterances where it is unclear
what the child said.
— exclamations, mm, oh, etc, except
when they form the entire utterance
— false starts, want - want drink
Count the number of morphemes, both content and grammatical, counting as a
single morpheme:
— compound words, choo-choo,
birthday etc
— words with ‘ie/y’, mummy, doggie
— irregular past tense, went
but including as separate morphemes:
· auxiliaries; will, , is, ’s, have, ’ve,
etc
· all inflected endings ‘-s’, ‘-ed’, etc
Divide the total by the number of
utterance to get the MLU