The goal of a play-based assessment is to encourage children to verbalize their thoughts, perceptions and feelings. During a play-based assessment, clinicians provide children with toys, ask them to describe pictures or retell stories, or otherwise express themselves freely. The result is a spontaneous language sample that allows clinicians to analyze a child’s syntactic, semantic and discourse regulation skills.
Observing a child’s free-play interactions is unobtrusive and can help preserve natural verbal interaction, but a child’s language may vary according to the different types of toys used, making results variable. Play-based assessments take more time and may require multiple sessions. Since this type of session is less focused, a play-based assessment may also make accurately determining a child’s expressive capabilities more difficult.
Contextualized language sampling occurs in a specific context, such as a place (school, office, etc.), number and identity of participants (friends, clinician or classmates) or task at hand (journaling or small-group lesson, for example). When older children are involved, clinicians may use probing questions and comments to obtain a representative clinical sample. While the range of potential topics may be limited or controlled, a child’s specific linguistic choices are not, so contextualized language sampling can still be considered a spontaneous sample.
A highly structured context can limit what a child says, making evaluation of conversational skills difficult. However, language sampling can yield more specific information because it includes not only the content of language but also its context. A study conducted in "The Journal of Speech and Hearing Research" found that most linguistic behaviors occurred more often during contextualized language sampling (an interview) than during play-based assessments (free play).