While research undertaken worldwide indicates that mean length of utterance ( MLU ) is a valuable index in investigations of child language development, to date there have been no studies exploring MLU in pre-primary Cypriot Greek ( CYG )-speaking children. The participants in this study were 36 monolingual CYG -speaking children at ages 36, 40, 44 and 48 months, with a typical course of language development. The findings demonstrated that MLU counted in words ( MLU -w) of typically developing CYG -speaking children had a positive correlation with age (from 36 to 48 months) and a non-significant difference in MLU -w by gender at each age point, and that typically developing CYG -speaking children, for the age range studied, tended to produce more multiword utterance types. An outcome of this study is an MLU -w database which could be used, with some caution, in the language assessment of a similar population or as the basis for future studies. Areas for further research are identified.

中文翻译：

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塞浦路斯希腊语儿童的平均话语长度

虽然世界范围内进行的研究表明，平均话语长度 (MLU) 是儿童语言发展调查中的一个有价值的指标，但迄今为止，还没有研究在学前塞浦路斯希腊语 (CYG) 儿童中探索 MLU。本研究的参与者是 36 名 36、40、44 和 48 个月的单语儿童，具有典型的语言发展过程。研究结果表明，典型发育的 CYG 儿童的 MLU 以字数 (MLU -w) 计算与年龄（36 至 48 个月）呈正相关，并且 MLU -w 在每个年龄点按性别没有显着差异，对于所研究的年龄范围，通常发展为 CYG 语言的儿童往往会产生更多的多词话语类型。这项研究的结果是一个可以使用的 MLU -w 数据库，在对类似人群的语言评估中或作为未来研究的基础时要谨慎。确定了进一步研究的领域。