speech pathology question regarding MLU...?

Question:I am transcribing a naturalistic language sample during a board game activity. There is lots of rote counting when taking a turn, which makes up a good portion of my language sample. I am hesitant to include the rote counting as part of the MLU because this is not truly "language" just memorization, and will inflate the MLU sample I think. Shoudl I not count rote counting at all, and just exclude, or count it as 1 because it is one utterance.? Thanks!

Answers:
Assuming you are not doing research and you are trying to identify a specific skill. You don't need to worry too much. You should use your clinical judgment. If you are trying to decide if the child is in need of services then you have many tools you can use to help make this decision. If you are trying to get a baseline then adding counting will deflate your sample, not inflate it. It may be more important for you to decide if the counting was appropriate? Source(s):
www.slpcommunity.com It's hard to know what to do in this situation.

I think that whatever decision you make should be well-motivated by the research goals and modeled from previous studies.

Since you didn't say what your research question is, it's hard to say.

If you can find examples of how previous studies dealt with this issue, you can make your decision based on them.

Otherwise, I'd say it's probably better to be more conservative (i.e., include the counting) because that way you can't be criticized for skewing the results with the way you coded the data. If your research is to measure conversational speech data, then no, don't count the rote counting.

If your research is to measure global speech data, then do count the rote counting.

In either case, this is a good issue to bring up in your final report's discussion section!

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