Language sample characteristics are what type of assessment?

• A. Criterion-referenced.
• B. Norm-referenced.
• C. Diagnostic.
• D. None of the above.

Answer: (A)

Language sample analysis is used to assess language against fixed developmental criteria rather than how a child compares to peers. When you examine a language sample, you look at whether the child meets specific benchmarks and features at their age—things like mean length of utterance, use of grammatical morphemes, variety of sentence types, and presence of certain syntactic forms. This focuses on describing what the child can produce according to predefined standards, which is the hallmark of criterion-referenced assessment.

Norm-referenced approaches, by contrast, would rank a child relative to a normative group and yield standard scores or percentiles. Diagnostic judgments can be informed by language samples, but the sample’s role here is to describe performance against criteria, not to diagnose based on a normed comparison.