Collect a language sample

For choosing an approach, materials, and recording arrangements, see Plan and prepare.

Let the task guide your role

The clinician’s role changes with the elicitation task. In conversation, you participate in the exchange. In a story retell, the speaker may be expected to sustain more of the telling, with less contribution from you.

SALT’s conversation protocol describes turn-taking and clarification within a conversational exchange. Its story-retell protocol calls for minimal prompting and specifies that prompts should not supply answers or vocabulary.

Keep the relevant elicitation instructions available during collection. Useful starting points include SALT’s protocols by sampling context, SUGAR’s collection training and procedures, and SLAM’s materials and analysis guidance.

Consider what your prompts contribute

A prompt can invite someone to continue, direct attention to a particular detail, or supply part of the response. For example:

An answer to “Was the character frightened?” shows a response to a supplied interpretation; it does not establish that the speaker independently chose that explanation or vocabulary. The selected procedure determines which prompts belong in the sample and how additional questioning is handled.

When you move into follow-up questions or provide a model, keep that transition identifiable in the recording or notes. It will help you distinguish the original production from responses to additional support during analysis.

Respond when the interaction changes

If a topic draws little response, a change of topic may offer another way into a flexible conversational task. Replacing materials in a task tied to a reference database has a different consequence: the new activity may fall outside that comparison’s collection procedure. Note where the change occurs so the two portions can be examined separately.

A sequence of brief answers may reflect the questions being asked as well as the speaker’s productions. Yes/no questions offer different opportunities from invitations to describe an event or explain an activity. SALT’s conversational guidance addresses the use of yes/no questions within its procedure. Conversation protocol

For added support, record what you did and where it occurred—for example, “After the first telling, asked what happened on each picture.” This identifies which language followed additional questions.

Record the exchange and retain the context

The clinician’s turns can be necessary to understand the speaker’s responses. Preserve the exchange so that, during transcription, you can tell whether a word was introduced by the speaker, supplied in a question, or repeated after a model.

Some context will not be clear from audio alone. A speaker may refer to a picture, point to an object, or respond to an action. Where that context affects your understanding, a short note with a timestamp or page reference can be useful. Keep observations distinct from interpretation—for example, identifying the picture indicated rather than assigning an intended meaning to a gesture.

Useful collection notes are the ones that help answer a later question:

Keep these details with the recording using the storage arrangements selected during preparation.

When collection ends sooner than planned

Sometimes the appointment ends before you collect as much language as you intended. The next question is what the available sample can support: which analyses are possible, whether a particular comparison is appropriate, and what the productions themselves show.

Analyze and interpret describes options when a score or reference comparison is unavailable. Transcribe a language sample covers the next work with the recording: segmentation, annotation, and review of an automatic draft.