Establishing guidelines for MLU measurement in an agglutinating language: An illustration of Georgian.

This article investigates the use of mean length of utterance (MLU) as a language assessment tool for early Georgian child language development, addressing the lack of standardized instruments for this morphologically rich, agglutinative language. Based on a longitudinal corpus of two monolingual Georgian-speaking children aged 12–35 months and prior research, the authors developed detailed guidelines for calculating MLU in morphemes (MLU-m), considering Georgian’s complex inflectional morphology and productivity criteria. Comparative analyses of MLU-m, MLU in words (MLU-w), and MLU in syllables (MLU-s) showed that while all correlate with age, MLU-m most accurately reflects morphosyntactic development, with MLU-s useful for early linguistic growth and MLU-w less sensitive to morphological changes. The study highlights the necessity of language-specific MLU adaptations and calls for further research with larger corpora to validate these guidelines and support clinical assessment of Georgian-speaking children.