Language Sample Elicitation Prompts by Age — Cheatsheet
Printable one-page reference of age-appropriate language-sample elicitation prompts from 18 months to 12 years, with target utterance counts and topic cues.
Overview
A 50-utterance language sample is only as good as the prompts that elicit it. A clinician who walks in with "tell me about your weekend" for a four-year-old will walk out with a 25-utterance sample full of one-word confirmations — useless for MLU, useless for SUGAR, useless for goal writing. This cheatsheet is the prompt bank most SLPs wish they had in graduate school: age-banded conversation starters, play-scaffold cues, and narrative prompts tuned to elicit the kind of connected-speech production that a 50-utterance LSA actually needs.
This cheatsheet is a static reference intended for clinical and educational use. Every page is rendered from a peer-reviewed source and cited below the printable sheet. Clinicians must adapt to the individual patient and to the current edition of any cited instrument manual before clinical use.
How to use this sheet
Print the sheet and tape it to the inside cover of the language-sample kit. Before the session, find the child's age band on the sheet and pre-select two prompts from the conversation column and one from the narrative column — three prompts is almost always enough to reach a 50-utterance target if the clinician resists filling silences with questions. During the session, lean on the prompt as a scaffold; resist the urge to substitute yes/no questions for open-ended ones, because yes/no responses drop the child's mean utterance length by an average of 1.5 morphemes in published LSA methods studies. Pair this cheatsheet with the language-sample worksheet tool for transcription and with the MLU-norms-by-age cheatsheet for interpretation — three prints, one sample, defensible goal.
“Every new clinician I supervise walks into an LSA with a toy bin and no plan. Three pre-selected prompts beat a toy bin every time — the sample runs faster, the child produces longer utterances, and the transcription takes half as long.”
Get the full analysis
Stop hand-copying the lsa prompts numbers into every report
Upload the session audio and ConductSpeech extracts the metrics, formats them against the published norm band, and drops a ready-to-paste present levels paragraph next to the cheatsheet values. Built for school-based SLPs on 50-student caseloads.
Printable sheet
| Age band | Conversation prompt | Narrative prompt | Target utterances |
|---|---|---|---|
| 18–30 months | Play scaffold with a familiar toy set (blocks, play-food); clinician comments without questions. | "Tell me what the bear is doing." (wordless picture book, page by page) | 30–50 utterances |
| 2;6–3;6 | "Let's play pretend — you be the cook, I'll be the customer. What's on the menu?" | "Here's a picture of a birthday party. Tell me the whole story." | 50 utterances (SUGAR) |
| 3;6–5;0 | "Tell me about your favourite thing to do when you get home from school." | Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1969) wordless book retell. | 50 utterances |
| 5;0–7;0 | "If you could invent a new playground at your school, what would you put on it and why?" | "Tell me a made-up story about a kid who finds a magic egg." | 50 utterances |
| 7;0–9;0 | "Tell me about a time you got really excited about something — what happened and how did it feel?" | Personal narrative prompt: "Tell me about the best birthday you've ever had." | 50–75 utterances |
| 9;0–12;0 | "Explain to me how to play your favourite video game — pretend I've never played before." | Expository prompt: "Tell me everything you know about the water cycle." | 75–100 utterances |
Prompt bank adapted from SALT Software protocol, Miller & Iglesias (2023) SUGAR method, and Heilmann et al. (2010) narrative sampling guidance.
Common pitfalls
- Substituting yes/no questions ("do you like ...?") for open-ended prompts. Yes/no responses collapse MLU by ~1.5 morphemes and fail the LSA entirely.
- Using the same prompt list for monolingual and bilingual children. Bilingual LSA requires language-matched prompts in both L1 and L2 — the English prompt bank is not sufficient.
- Ending the sample as soon as 50 utterances are collected. The last 10 utterances are often the richest because the child has warmed up — run to 60 and trim the opening.
- Scoring the clinician's own utterances into the child's utterance count. Only the child's productions belong in the 50-utterance denominator.
Free tools paired with this cheatsheet
Language Sample Worksheet
Free printable and fillable language sample analysis worksheet for speech-language pathologists. Five columns (utterance #, transcription, morpheme count, grammatical Y/N, notes), configurable row count up to 100 utterances, browser print produces a clean PDF, and an inline running summary tracks total utterances, total morphemes, and rolling MLU as you fill it in.
Open toolMLU Calculator
Paste a language sample and get Mean Length of Utterance in morphemes and words, total utterances, total morphemes, and the matching Brown's stage. Implements Brown (1973) morpheme counting rules and runs entirely in your browser.
Open toolNarrative Scoring Scheme (NSS) Calculator
Free interactive Narrative Scoring Scheme (NSS) calculator implementing the Heilmann, Miller, Nockerts, & Dunaway (2010) rubric for school-based and clinic speech-language pathologists scoring paediatric narrative language samples. Rate each of the seven NSS subscales (introduction, character development, mental states, referencing, conflict resolution, cohesion, conclusion) from 0 (immature / absent) to 5 (proficient) based on the child's story retell or personal narrative, and the calculator sums the subscale scores, classifies the total out of 35 against the published 5-11-year-old story-retell expectation band (15-28 of 35), and returns up to three intervention targets derived from the lowest-scoring subscales. Built for school SLPs, clinic SLPs, early-intervention teams, graduate SLP students, and paediatric language researchers. Mobile-friendly, client-side, no sign-up.
Open toolRelated cheatsheets
MLU-Morpheme Norms by Age — Printable Reference
Printable one-page reference of Mean Length of Utterance in morphemes (MLU-M) expectations by chronological age, including Brown, Miller, and Rice norms.
MorphosyntaxBrown's 14 Grammatical Morphemes — Acquisition Order Cheatsheet
Printable reference of Brown's (1973) 14 grammatical morphemes in acquisition order, with age of mastery, example markers, and clinical significance for each.
IEP & school practiceSMART IEP Goal Format — Printable Reference
Printable one-page reference of the SMART IEP goal framework with the five elements, IDEA-compliant phrasing patterns, and a worked SLP example per element.
References
- Miller, J. F., & Iglesias, A. (2023). Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT), Research Version. SALT Software.
- Pavelko, S. L., & Owens, R. E. (2017). Sampling Utterances and Grammatical Analysis Revised (SUGAR): New normative values for language sample analysis measures. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 48(3), 197–215.
- Heilmann, J., Miller, J. F., Nockerts, A., & Dunaway, C. (2010). Properties of the Narrative Scoring Scheme using narrative retells in young school-age children. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 19(2), 154–166.
- Mayer, M. (1969). Frog, Where Are You? Dial Books.