2.4.2.2. Re-telling a story, parental report and SLT observations about child’s functional communication. Responses were coded
for: (1) presence or absence of the functions (seeAppendixC) (StoryTelling Task); (2)modalityof communication(Visual/spatial
and/or auditory/oral); (3) Child’s level and type of communication: pre-linguistic, linguistic (spoken) or linguistic (signed).
2.4.3. Mean Length of Longest Utterances
The following rules were used to calculate utterance length: (1) vocatives, negatives, affirmatives, polite terms, greetings
and repetitions were ignored; (2) Inflectional morphemes (e.g. plurals) were counted; (3) compound words, proper names,
and reduplications were counted as single morphemes. The MLU-L was calculated for speech or sign produced during
spontaneous play and during the story-telling sequence. Example: [The boy fell off his bicycle and cried]
spoken Portuguese: [O/ menin /o/ cai /u / da / bicicleta /e /chor / ou] = scoring of MLU-L for SpL = 10 morphemes
Libras: [MENIN / O / CAIR / BICICLETA /CHORAR] = scoring of MLU-L for SL = 5 morphemes.
Children were classified as being at the Pre-Linguistic Level when their MLU-L was equal to zero; and at the Linguistic
Level (signed or spoken language) when their MLU-L was equal to or above 1.0.