Language samples provide which type of data?

• A. Qualitative and quantitative data.
• B. Only qualitative data.
• C. Only quantitative data.
• D. None of these.

Answer: (A)

Language samples capture both descriptive, nonnumerical aspects and numerical measures of language use. For qualitative data, you describe features like narrative coherence, discourse organization, pragmatics, fluency, and error patterns in a way that emphasizes quality and style rather than numbers. For quantitative data, you tally measures such as mean length of utterance, total number of utterances, words per utterance, lexical diversity, and error frequencies to quantify performance and compare across tasks or over time. Because language samples provide rich descriptive information plus concrete counts, they yield both qualitative and quantitative data.