Summary: | This essay deals with the start of children’s first language acquisition and will measure thesyntactic development of children through counting the MLU (mean length of utterance). Achild, 12 months old, will be studied through transcripts, video and audio over the course of ayear. The material used for this essay can be found on the online corpus CHILDES which is alarge database of transcripts of child language. The graphs and charts in this study willdemonstrate the MLU value from 12 to 24 months of one child. It also shows the amount ofdifferent word classes being produced on a monthly basis. Further, in the results a low valueof the MLU is provided which can be associated with various explanations. Cases ofbacksliding also occur in the graph. On the discourse of different word classes’ presence,during the given time frame, the chart shows a high usage of nouns and verbs thatproportionally increases with age, which is common at the given stage.
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