Mean length of utterance (or MLU) is a measure of linguistic productivity in children. It is traditionally calculated by collecting 100 utterances spoken by a child and dividing the number of morphemes by the number of utterances. A higher MLU is taken to indicate a higher level of language proficiency.

Why do we measure MLU?

It is necessary, therefore, to examine several utterances and then to calculate the average length of utterance based on a count of the number of individual morphemes in each utterance. … We can calculate the MLU as follows. Taking each utterance in turn, we count the number of morphemes in the utterances.

How is MLU language sample calculated?

Microsoft Word for Language Sample Analysis One you have a document with just the child’s utterances, go to Tools —> Word Count. Step Three: Divide the number next to Words (113 in this example) by 50 (the total number of utterances). This calculation gives you an MLU of 2.26. Easy, right?!