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This article explores the applicability of mean length of utterance (MLU) as a language assessment measure for Georgian child language, as to-date, Georgian, a morphologically rich language with numerous inflectional categories, experiences an extensive lack of instruments for early language assessment. To this end, a set of guidelines for calculating Georgian MLU was developed based on the analysis of a longitudinal corpus of two Georgian-speaking children aged 12-35 months. This was supported by the findings of previous studies on Georgian acquisition. Furthermore, the guidelines were used to compare MLU in morphemes (MLU-m) with MLU in words (MLU-w) and MLU in syllables (MLU-s) to determine the most suitable method for assessing morphological development in Georgian. These results indicate that MLU-m closely aligns with the description of language development in Georgian children. MLU-s is useful for demonstrating early linguistic development, while MLU-w correlates with age but does not capture changes within words over time. Further testing on a larger corpus is needed to refine the guidelines for more accurate assessment of Georgian-speaking children.

This paper describes the language acquisition and verb-forming processes related to the issue of argument marking for native-speaker Georgian children from 24 to 42 months of age, who were born and raised in Georgia. Because of the complexity of the Georgian verbal system, it is a challenge to study the acquisition process in this language. We attempted to observe how native-speaker children overcome this complexity during the acquisition process. The study is based on samples of four Georgian-speaking children from the developing corpus of Georgian-speaking children.