Examining Mean Length of Utterance in Morphemes (MLUm) as a Measure of Grammatical Development in Bangla
Asifa Sultana · Journal of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech · 2026
Background: Mean length of Utterance (MLU) is used by child language researchers and practitioners as a global measure of children’s grammatical development. As guided by the purposes of investigations, MLU can be calculated in various units e.g. in words, morphemes, and syllables. However, MLU is also known to be sensitive to the contextual factors of language samples, and the calculation can be highly dependent on the typological factors of the target language. Aims: The study examined the efficacy of MLUm as a measure of grammatical development in Bangla. By comparing the language samples of two groups of children with typical and atypical development, the study also identified some measures of grammatical development that may be of used in assessment.Methods and Procedures: A group of children with Atypical Language Development (ALD) (n= 9) was matched with a group of younger Typically-developing (TD) children (n= 9) in terms of their MLUm calculated from 20-minute spontaneous language samples. Group means as well as individual scores on a range of languages measures such as Total Number of Utterances (TNU), Free Morpheme Types (FMT), Bound Morpheme Types (BMT), Longest Utterances (LU), Verbless Utterances (VLU), and Grammatical Errors (GE) were compared to identify the differences. Correlation analyses were run to explore the relationship between MLUm and grammatical development in Bangla.Outcomes and Results: The overall findings showed that MLUm was a useful marker of grammatical development in Bangla. Among the other measures calculated, BMT, LU and VLU appeared to be promising.Conclusions and Implications: Although limited in the sample size, the study offered significant directions for the clinical practitioners involved in assessing Bangla-speaking children’s language development. The study also emphasized the importance of typological considerations in using the assessment measures.