Table 1.
Summarized definitions of the quantitative production analysis measures following Saffran et al. (1989)
| Dependent measures | Formula | Annotation |
|---|---|---|
| Speech measures | ||
| Words per minute | Number of words produced / length of speech sample (min) | All intelligible words produced |
| Narrative measures | ||
| Narrative words | Number of words directly contributing to narrative | Excluding direct responses to or repetition of examiner’s speech, uninterpretable neologisms, consistently used stereotypes, utterances repaired, markers of direct discourse and conjunctions joining complete sentences |
| Morphological measures | ||
| % Closed-class words produced | Number of closed-class words / number of narrative words | Closed-class words: all words excluding nouns, verbs, adjectives and -ly adverbs |
| % Pronouns produced | Number of pronouns / (number of nouns + pronouns) | Pronouns: personal, reflexive, and indefinite pronouns |
| % Verbs produced | Number of verbs / (number of nouns + verbs) | Verbs: all verb forms (e.g. infinitive, gerundive and copula) |
| Determiner index | Number of nouns requiring determiners, with determiners / number of nouns requiring determiners | Nouns requiring determiners (excluding proper nouns and plurals when in contexts not requiring determiners) |
| Auxiliary index | (Auxiliary score / number of matrix verbs) − 1 | Matrix verb: the main verb in a sentence auxiliary score: each matrix verb itself and auxiliary element of the matrix verb was assigned 1 point |
| Auxiliaries include modal, tense markers and inflections on main verb | ||
| Structural measures | ||
| Mean utterance length | Number of words in utterances / number of utterances | Utterances defined by syntactic and prosodic boundaries |
| % Words in sentences | Number of words in sentences / number of narrative words | Sentence defined as an utterance including a subject/predicate structure: noun/pronoun + main verb or noun/pronoun+ copula + adjective/prepositional phrase |
| Mean sentence length | Number of words in sentences / number of sentences | |
| % Well-formed sentences | Number of syntactically well-formed sentences / Number of sentences | Sentential ill-formedness could include omission of obligatory arguments, deleted elements, agreement errors or other syntactic anomalies |
| Embedding index | Number of embeddings / number of sentences | Embeddings: number of embedded clauses associated with a main clause |
| Elaboration index | Subject noun phrase elaboration + verb phrase elaboration | Phrase elaboration = (number of open class words and pronouns in a phrase / number of phrases) − 1 |