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.

Phonological whole‐word measures in 3‐year‐old bilingual children and their age‐matched monolingual peers

“…The authors observed that the children's pMLU in their study became more varied as age increased, which is expected, because such variation is inherent in an expanding vocabulary as children add more complex words but keep producing the earlier acquired relatively simpler lexical items. Taelman et al (2005) noted a steady increase in pMLU at a rate of ,0.18 a month for all but one of the children from ,1.5-3 years of age. This rate of increase in the children's pMLU displayed a significant linear increase for eight of the nine children studied.…”

“…Taelman et al, 2005;Saaristo-Helin et al, 2006) and have also been used with monolingual children with phonological disorders (e.g. Flipsen et al, 2005), and typically developing bilingual children and their peers with SLI (e.g.…”

“…Phonological whole-word measures were also used by Taelman, Durieux, and Gillis (2005) to investigate the phonology of Dutch children. The authors observed that the children's pMLU in their study became more varied as age increased, which is expected, because such variation is inherent in an expanding vocabulary as children add more complex words but keep producing the earlier acquired relatively simpler lexical items.…”

Measuring Phonological Development: A Follow-up Study of Five Children Acquiring Finnish

“…Hence the data is obtained from spontaneous speech samples, whereas standardized tests usually exploit elicited data (Taelman, Durieux, & Gillis, 2005). The use of spontaneous speech samples when evaluating children's phonological development has indisputable benefits since it is well known that in picture-naming tests children are more intelligible than in spontaneous speech.…”

“…However, due to differences in language structures, the stages proposed by Ingram are not applicable to all languages, for example, Finnish (Saaristo-Helin, Savinainen-Makkonen, & Kunnari, 2006). Taelman et al (2005) as well as Saaristo-Helin et al (2006) have also noted a need to revise the rules for the calculation of the PMLU since many issues were not covered in the rules proposed by Ingram and Ingram (2001). Table 1 summarizes the rules for the calculation of the PMLU (Ingram, 2002;Bónová, Slančová, & Mikulajová, 2005).…”