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In most situations it's easy to determine where a word begins and ends. However, there are some situations that require discussion.
What is a word?
When considering what constitutes a word, think about two things: first, that the "word" is consistently used by the child, and second, that the "word" is consistently interpreted by the listener. A "word" is in the ear of the listener. If a parent or person familiar with the child considers a production a word, then you should treat it as a separate word or form. For example,
E What is the fish do/ing?
C {ba ba ba}.
E He is swim/ing in the water.
C Wawa.
E Good.
In this example, "wawa" for water is considered a word. Babbling, on the other hand, would be transcribed as a vocalization using the convention for comments so as not to over-credit morphology and/or vocabulary. In this example "ba ba ba" is treated as a comment and not a word. |
Names and Titles
When names or titles are used, you should give the speaker credit for just one word. To do this, use the underscore character to link consecutive words. For example,
C Little_Red_Riding_Hood went to her grandma/z house.
C I told Mr_Jones that I would be late to class.
When words are linked, they will be counted as one single unit in the SALT analyses to avoid over-inflation of such values as the MLU and the number of different words. Make sure you use the underscore character, not the hyphen, when you link words together.
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Legal Word Characters
SALT does not have a dictionary to define words. Instead a word is considered to be any combination of legal word characters. In general, words consist of letters, numbers and a special set of characters, such as the asterisk to mark omissions and the slash to mark bound morphemes, which have specific meaning in SALT. Words are separated by blank spaces and commas. Words may be "quoted". Other characters, such as the period used to mark the end of an utterance or the colon used to mark pauses, are not legal word characters. |
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