Eliciting Language Samples for Analysis (ELSA): A New Protocol for Assessing Expressive Language and Communication in Autism.
ELSA gives you reliable utterance and turn counts in 20 minutes without transcription—perfect for quick language baselines in minimally verbal clients.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team built a 20-minute play protocol called ELSA. It uses toys, books, and snacks to pull language out of kids with autism who speak little or none.
Therapists code each word and turn live, no stopwatch or transcript needed. They tested it on toddlers through teens to see if the numbers held up.
What they found
ELSA worked. The live counts of utterances and back-and-forth turns matched later transcript scores.
One quick session gave a valid picture of expressive level across a wide age span.
How this fits with other research
Chiang (2009) watched teachers prompt kids in class and saw few words even with modeling. ELSA keeps the same toys-and-prompts spirit but packs it into a short, scripted routine you can repeat.
Schlink et al. (2024) used fancy statistics to rank ESCS gestures from easy to hard. ELSA adds spoken counts to that toolkit; use both to see which comes first—gesture or word.
Ward et al. (2021) found that informal cake-decorating revealed hidden words in Rett syndrome. ELSA offers a similar low-stress route for autism, but with clear rules so any staff can run it the same way.
Why it matters
You no longer need to record, transcribe, and count later. Run ELSA during intake, get raw utterance and turn numbers on the spot, and use them to set speech or SGD goals. The protocol is free, short, and works from early intervention to high school.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Expressive language and communication are among the key targets of interventions for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and natural language samples provide an optimal approach for their assessment. Currently, there are no protocols for collecting such samples that cover a wide range of ages or language abilities, particularly for children/adolescents who have very limited spoken language. We introduce a new protocol for collecting language samples, eliciting language samples for analysis (ELSA), and a novel approach for deriving basic measures of verbal communicative competence from it that bypasses the need for time-consuming transcription. Study 1 presents ELSA-adolescents (ELSA-A), designed for minimally and low-verbal older children/adolescents with ASD. The protocol successfully engaged and elicited speech from 46 participants across a wide range of ages (6;6-19;7) with samples averaging 20-25 min. The collected samples were segmented into speaker utterances (examiner and participant) using real-time coding as one is listening to the audio recording and two measures were derived: frequency of utterances and conversational turns per minute. These measures were shown to be reliable and valid. For Study 2, ELSA was adapted for younger children (ELSA-Toddler [ELSA-T]) with samples averaging 29 min from 19 toddlers (2;8-4;10 years) with ASD. Again, measures of frequency of utterances and conversational turns derived from ELSA-T were shown to have strong psychometric properties. In Study 3, we found that ELSA-A and ELSA-T were equivalent in eliciting language from 17 children with ASD (ages: 4;0-6;8), demonstrating their suitability for deriving robust objective assessments of expressive language that could be used to track change in ability over time. We introduce a new protocol for collecting expressive language samples, ELSA, that can be used with a wide age range, from toddlers (ELSA-T) to older adolescents (ELSA-A) with ASD who have minimal or low-verbal abilities. The measures of language and communication derived from them, frequency of utterances, and conversational turns per minute, using real-time coding methods, can be used to characterize ability and chart change in intervention research. LAY SUMMARY: We introduce a new protocol for collecting expressive language samples, ELSA, that can be used with a wide age range, from toddlers (ELSA-T) to older adolescents (ELSA-A) with autism spectrum disorder who have minimal or low-verbal abilities. The measures of language and communication derived from them, frequency of utterances and conversational turns per minute, using real-time coding methods, can be used to characterize ability and chart change in intervention research.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2021 · doi:10.1002/aur.2380