Research into Phonological Mean Length of Utterance (pMLU)

Research into phonological compressed Length of Utterance (pMLU)particular proposition linguistic process impairment (SLI) is a disorder defined by excision. tykeren with SLI butt on lyric poem difficulties in the absence of other factors, such as auditory modality loss, affable impairment, physical impairment, emotional disturbance, or environmental deprivation (Bishop, 1992a, 1992b Lubert, 1981). Children with SLI have bar acquiring one or more of the components of langu season, i.e. plaster cast (phonemics, morphology, and syntax), content (semantics), and occasion (pragmatics). The field of phonological achievement has made extensive efforts to account its education through normative studies (Templin, 1957 Olmstead, 1971) and part tests (Hodsen Paden, 1991). Earlier, the research focus was on sicness of consonants as sanitary as the analysis of segments in general. Recently the safe and sound enunciate complexity has been stressed (Masterson Kamhi, 1992, Ingra m, 2002). One such quantity is the phonological mean length of utterance (pMLU). It is a social unit word judge for measuring phonological development (Ingram,2002). It measures the length of a sm entirely frys rowing and the issuance of correct consonants. The pMLU for a linguistic process sample is calculated by (1) retrieve step forward the re lift of segments (consonants and vowels) in individually word as produced by the infant (2) counting the offspring of consonants produced in to each one word that the babe produced accurately (3) summing these two add togethers (4) totaling these sums and (5) dividing this total by the total number of quarrel in the sample. pMLU quantifies development of phonology and focuses on the childrens whole-word productions instead of specific segments. Ingram demonstrates the hold dear of the pMLU measure by applying it wide station of contexts.NEED FOR THE STUDYAlthough pMLU has been turn to in habitual as s puff up as ph onological disorders and cochlear implanted children, the alike(p) is not focussed on children with SLI. Since PMLU is a whole word measure, problems in phonology and morphosyntax are expected to reduce the score. because PMLU idler be used to check over the difficulties if any in phonology and morphosyntax of children with SLI. Hence the present study was planned.AIM OF THE STUDY To compare the pMLU of children with SLI in comparison with typically develop Kannada speaking children.METHOD This study followed a case incorporate design. Participants were divided into 2 root words. Clinical conclave comprised of sextette individuals (5 males 1 female) with SLI in the be on range of 4 to 6 years. The diagnosing of SLI was do on the basis of Leonards exclusionary criteria and the informal sagaciousness of morpho-syntax by the ancient investigator. The control group comprised of age matched 30 children out of which 15 were males and 15 females. Exclusion criteria considere d were vernacular, language, hearing and neurological problems. A minimum of 50 off-the-cuff speech utterances were elicited from each child for a duration of 30 to 40 minutes which was audio recorded apply SONY recorder.The childrens utterances were narrow set down and pMLU was calculated for each word produced by the child. The sum of each word in all the utterances were totalled and divided by the number of words produced by the child to obtain the pMLU scores. pMLU was calculated for all the children in twain the groups. Mann Whitney U test was administered to find out the signifi discharget differences betwixt the means of both the groups.RESULTS The results of the Mann Whitney U probe revealed a statistically significant difference between the means of pMLU scores across the group at p intervention pMLU is a whole-word measure for phonological development. The results of the present study revealed that the pMLU scores for the children with SLI were land in comparison to children with everyday language development. This could be attributed to the increased number of incorrect consonants in the speech of clinical group when compared to the control group.The go down in pMLU scores in the clinical group could similarly be due to the deficit in the use of morphosyntax as these children were having morphosyntactic errors. This in turn suggests that children with SLI are inferior in the acquisition of segments and in their whole-word phonological improvement to typically maturation children. As this pMLU measure allow ins the number of segments in a word, pMLU can be used to indicate morphosyntactic abnormalities in children with SLI. This tool can to a fault serve as an aid for monitoring the progress of a child when assessed pre and post therapeutically.CONCLUSION The present study investigated pMLU in children with SLI in the age range of 4-6 years. The results revealed that children with SLI are inferior in the acquisition of segments includi ng morphemes as well as in their whole-word phonological growth than the typically ontogenesis children. Hence, pMLU measure could be regarded as a yardstick for phonological and morphosyntactic development in children with SLI.INTRODUCTIONSLI is a disorder defined by exclusion. Children with SLI exhibit language difficulties in the absence of other factors, such as hearing loss, mental impairment, physical impairment, emotional disturbance, or environmental deprivation (Bishop, 1992a, 1992b Lubert, 1981). specific language impairment (SLI) has been estimated to affect approximately 7 percent of children (Leonard, 1998 Tomblin et al., 1997) and to stomach into adolescence (Aram et al., 1984 Beitchman et al., 1996 Stothard et al., 1998Johnson et al., 1999). Children with SLI have difficulty acquiring one or more of the components of language, i.e. form (phonology, morphology, and syntax), content (semantics), and use (pragmatics).However, as a group they show disproportional diff iculty with some field of views, performing worse than typically growth children matched on vocabulary level or mean length of utterance. Several authors (eg, Leonard et al.,1992 strain et al., 1995 Rice and Wexler, 1996 Oetting and Horohov, 1997 van der Lely and Ullman, 2001) observe that this is particularly the case in the area of verb morphology and it has also been inform in some areas of syntax, including the comprehension of peaceable sentences (Bishop, 1979 van der Lely and Harris, 1990 van der Lely, 1996) and formation of wh-questions (Leonard 1995 van der Lely and Battell, 2003).The field of phonological acquisition has made extensive efforts to measure its development through normative studies (Templin, 1957 Olmstead, 1971) and articulation tests (Hodsen Paden, 1991). Earlier studies have focused on correctness of consonants as well as the analysis of segments in general. Recent studies have focused on the whole word complexity (Masterson Kamhi, 1992, Ingram, 2002) . One such measure is the Phonological mean length of utterance (PMLU). It is a whole word measure for measuring phonological proficiency (Ingram, 2002). It measures the length of a childs words and the number of correct consonants. The PMLU for a speech sample is calculated by (1) counting the number of segments (consonants and vowels) in each word as produced by the child (2) counting the number of consonants produced in each word that the child produced accurately (3) summing these two numbers (4) totaling these sums and (5) dividing this total by the total number of words in the sample. PMLU quantifies development of phonology and focuses on the childrens whole-word productions instead of specific segments. Ingram demonstrates the valuate of the PMLU measure by applying it in a wide range of contexts. These include a comparison of monolingual children, a comparison across languages, and the diagnosing of impairment or delay. Very few studies have addressed the PMLU in different languages. One such study is by Ingram (2002) who proposed preliminary PMLU stages, reflecting the doable level of development in English speaking children which are as follows.Helin, Makkonen Kunnari (2006) reported that PMLU was much higher in Finnish speaking children than those reported for children acquiring English. Balasubramanium bhat (2009) reported the same in kannada speaking typically developing children. Other studies have focused PMLU on the disordered population. Schauwers, Taelman, Gillis Govierts (2005) reported write down PMLU scores in children with cochlear implant than age matched typically developing peers and they also concluded that the earlier implanted children were more proficient than the later(prenominal) implanted children. Prasad, Hossabetu, Balasubramanium Bhat (2010) studied phonological mean length of utterance in children with phonological disorder and they reported, children with phonological disorder are inferior in the acquisition of seg ments as well as in their whole-word phonological proficiency than the typically developing children.NEED FOR THE STUDYAlthough pMLU has been addressed in normal as well as phonological disorders and cochlear implanted children, the same is not focussed on children with SLI. Since PMLU is a whole word measure, problems in phonology and morphosyntax are expected to reduce the score. Hence PMLU was used to investigate the difficulties if any in phonology and morphosyntax of children with SLI. Hence the present study was attempt in this direction.AIM OF THE STUDY To compare the pMLU of children with SLI in comparison with typically developing Kannada speaking children.METHODParticipantsThe study followed a case control design. Participants were divided into 2 groups i-e the control group and clinical group. Clinical group comprised of six individuals (5 males 1female) with specific language impairment in the age range of 3 to 6 years. The control group comprised of age matched 30 chi ldren out of which 15 were males and 15 females. The diagnosis of specific language impairment was done on the basis of Leonards exclusionary criteria and the informal assessment of morpho-syntax by the primary investigator. The exclusion criteria for the controls were the history of speech, language, neurological and hearing problems.ProcedureIn order to assess the phonological mean length of utterance, spontaneous speech utterances were elicited from each child for duration of 30 to 40 minutes. Samples consisted of minimum of 50 utterances. The experimenter served as a conversational partner and introduced the child to age appropriate toys and questions. The samples were obtained in an informal setting within the school premises for the control group and in the therapy premises for the clinical group. Audio recording was done using a portable Sony Recorder in a relatively muffled environment. The words were accepted for analysis according to the rules suggested by Ingram and Ingr am which are mentioned in the table mentioned in appendix. The childrens production of utterances was narrow transcribed and PMLU was calculated for each child. For each word, the number of segments (consonants and vowels) as produced by the child was counted and summed with the number of correct consonants in a word. The sum of each word in all the utterances of a single subject were totaled and divided by the number of words produced by the child to obtain the PMLU scores. Mann Whitney U test was administered to find out the significant differences between the means of both the groups.RESULTS The results of the Mann Whitney U Test revealed a statistically significant difference between the means of pMLU scores across the group at pGroup StatisticsDISCUSSIONpMLU is a whole-word measure for phonological development and is used to investigate the difficulties if any in phonology and morphosyntax. The present study compared the pMLU of children with SLI in comparison with typically de veloping Kannada speaking children. The results of the study revealed that the pMLU scores for the children with SLI were lower in comparison to children with normal language development. This could be attributed to the increased number of incorrect consonants in the speech of clinical group when compared to the control group as these children were neutralizing the sound contrasts and also exhibiting syllable reduction strategies. Whether it is syllable structure reduction or sound contrast neutralization, it reduces the overall pMLU score. As children with SLI are inferior in the acquisition of segments as well as in their whole-word phonological proficiency than the typically developing children, phonological errors are reflected in the pMLU scores. Hence it can be concluded that pMLU reflects on the phonological errors.The results of the present study are in consonance with findings that the developments of phonology in children with SLI are much later in comparison to typically developing children (Balasbramanium Bhat, 2009) and also that children with phonological disorder are inferior in the acquisition of segments as well as in their whole-word phonological proficiency than the typically developing children (Prasad, Hossabetu, Balasubramanium Bhat 2010). Hence, pMLU can be used as an assessment tool for children with SLI as this provides an objective assessment tool in the evaluation process.The decrease in pMLU scores in the clinical group could also be due to the deficit in the use of morphosyntax as these children were having morphosyntactic errors. This in turn suggests that children with SLI are inferior in the acquisition of morphemic segments when compared to typically developing children. As this pMLU measure includes the number of segments in a word, pMLU can be used to indicate morphosyntactic abnormalities in children with SLI. This tool can also serve as an aid for monitoring the progress of a child when assessed pre and post therapeutic ally.CONCLUSIONThe present study investigated pMLU in children with SLI in the age range of 4-6 years. 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