Charles Davis Apr 23, 2015:

And while we're about it... Promedio is a noun in Spanish. "Extensión promedio" is bad Spanish.

Charles Davis Apr 23, 2015:

PS. "Duración" is also wrong for length. "Extensión" would be OK, but "duración" is a function of time. It's obvious, really, that how many seconds it takes a speaker to utter an utterance is irrelevant, and that is not considered in calculating the MLU.

Charles Davis Apr 23, 2015:

Part 2 If a psycholinguist counts the average number of morphemes in 100 of a child’s locuciones or phrases, the result will be very different from the MLU.

On this topic, the Spanish Wikipedia entry is entirely unreliable, by the way. It proposes various Spanish equivalents of MLU: “Extensión promedio del lenguaje en morfema”, “emisión lingüística media” “duración promedio de la emisión”, “extensión promedio de la frase”. None of these is suitable or accurate and most are not used anywhere else, except in sources derived from this very entry. The exception is the last, which is found in at least one source that predates the Wikipedia page. But “frase” is definitely a bad mistranslation of utterance, and this version should not be imitated.
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensión_promedio_del_lenguaje...
http://www.balearweb.net/aoib/documents/PilarFitorDesarrollo...

Regrettably, we also have a previous KudoZ question replete with mistranslations:
http://www.proz.com/kudoz/english_to_spanish/education_pedag...

Charles Davis Apr 23, 2015:

Hi Blanca It looks like sour grapes when someone whose answer was not chosen comments on the asker’s choice, and I don’t want it to seem like that here. I just want to put on record, for the benefit of future users, that “locución” is not an accurate translation of “utterance” and is not applicable here.

MLU is a psycholinguistic marker calculated by taking 100 of a speaker’s (usually a child’s) utterances and counting the average number of morphemes or words (usually morphemes) that they contain. So it’s very important to be clear about what units they are considering.

“Locución” is a minimum meaningful sequence of words: a phrase. It is not specifically a property of spoken language; written language can also be divided into locuciones.

An utterance is a minimum unit of speech: a continuous piece of speech beginning and ending with a clear pause. It has no inherent syntactic definition. It can consist of a single locución (phrase) or of several, and it usually consists of several.

So an utterance in Spanish is an enunciado, defined by the DRAE as a “secuencia finita de palabras delimitada por pausas muy marcadas, que puede estar constituida por una o varias oraciones.”

To be continued