ArticleAmerican journal of speech-language pathology2026
Beyond Mean Length of Utterance: Novel Measures for Characterizing the Spoken Language of Autistic Children.
Article in American journal of speech-language pathology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
purposeMean length of utterance (MLU) is a common measure of expressive language complexity in young children, including autistic children. However, means, by nature, obscure some information about spread and variability in data. Thus, we aimed to examine a new approach to characterizing linguistic complexity in autistic children by investigating the validity of two novel measures-range of length of utterance (RLU), standard deviation of length of utterance (SDLU)-alongside established measures: MLU and total utterances (TU).
methodParticipants were 40 autistic children (12 girls, 28 boys;
resultsAll measures (MLU, SDLU, RLU, and TU) significantly predicted PLS expressive language (
conclusionsFindings suggest that these novel measures (SDLU and RLU) explained significant variance in children's expressive language, as measured by the PLS-5, as did MLU and TU. SDLU had the largest explanatory power, in absolute terms, followed by RLU and TU. MLU had the smallest effect size, indicating that it had the lowest explanatory power for explaining variance in children's expressive language as compared to the other three measures. Thus, examining spread and variability in utterance length data might provide important, previously overlooked, information about the complexity of autistic children's spoken language. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.30559880.
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