Language Sampling: Does the Length of the Transcript Matter?

Purpose: Language sample analysis is considered by many to be the gold standard for documenting children's oral language skills. One limitation, however, is the time required for collection and transcription of language samples. The goal of this study was to determine if stable language sample measures could be generated using relatively short language samples. Method: Measures were generated from children's conversational and narrative language samples after they were broken into three lengths (1-, 3-, and 7-min samples). The measures were compared to determine the stability of measures from the short samples (1 and 3 min) when compared to measures from the long sample (7 min). The measures were further analyzed to determine if differences across transcript cuts varied as a function of age group (2;8 [years;months]-5;11 vs. 6;0-13;3) or sampling context (conversation vs. narrative). Results: Overall, the language sample measures were quite consistent across the transcript cuts. Measures of productivity, lexical diversity, and utterance length were the most reliable when short samples were used. Conclusion: Implications for the efficient use of language sample analysis in clinical protocols are discussed. A framework for eliciting reliable short samples is provided.