Mean Length of Utterance

A measure of linguistic complexity calculated as the average number of words (or morphemes) per utterance in a language sample. Mean length of utterance is widely used in speech-language pathology to assess language development in children and to measure language production abilities in adults with communication disorders such as aphasia. In digital accessibility contexts, MLU can serve as a computational indicator of language difficulty in online writing, potentially enabling automated detection of communication impairments from text produced during human-computer interaction.