The LENA Pro system is a product of the LENA Research Foundation, a research-based organization in Boulder, CO. “LENA Research Foundation,” “LENA,” “Every Word Counts,” and the LENA logo are all trademarks of the LENA Research Foundation. All other trademarks, service marks, copyrights, and other intellectual property rights in this document are the property of the LENA Research Foundation. Information in this document is subject to change, and the LENA Research Foundation may make improvements and/or changes to this document or the products, services, protocols, and prices hereunder at any time without notice. Patent information: www.lenafoundation.org/patents.
LENA Research Foundation5525 Central Avenue, Suite 100
Boulder, CO 80301-2820
The LENA Research Foundation is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) charitable organization.
LENA Pro
LENATM Pro
The LENA Research Foundation is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) charitable organization.
Advanced technology to accelerate language development of children 0–5 and for research and treatment of language delays and disorders.
LENA Research Foundation | www.lenafoundation.org | 1.866.503.9918 | 5525 Central Avenue, Suite 100, Boulder, CO 80301-2820
‘‘LENA has the potential to radically transform child education and parenting, and is also providing a pioneering and invaluable technological breakthrough in the understanding of children’s
intellectual development.’’~ Frank J. Sulloway, Ph.D.,
Institute of Personality and Social Research, University of California, Berkeley;MacArthur Fellow; and author of Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives
Contents
LENA Pro ............................................................................................. 2
How It Works ..................................................................................... 2
Research Application Examples .......................................... 13–16
Clinical and Intervention Application Examples ............ 17–18
LENA Pro Users ........................................................................ 19–20
About LENA .................................................................................... 21
LENA Advanced Data Extractor (ADEX)
ADEX allows users to explore LENA Pro information beyond the core-report categories (i.e., adult words, conversational turns, and child vocalizations) and to create data samples based on additional variables and specific types of interactions or time intervals. For example, ADEX users can analyze male and female adult speech separately on both vocalization frequency and duration or determine how many times a key child initiated an interaction with an adult (or vice versa) or calculate the number of adult words spoken from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. The resolution of the export dataset ranges anywhere from segments only 600 milliseconds in duration all the way up to an entire 16-hour recording, and the convenient comma-delimited (.csv) plain text output file can be accessed directly using a variety of applications (e.g., Microsoft Excel, Notepad, SAS, and SPSS).
ADEX enables in-depth analysis of data processed by the LENA Pro system.
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Research Application Examples
As a researcher, you have many questions to answer while attempting to keep your approach as efficient and cost-effective as possible. Simply put, LENA allows you to gather a lot of data in a short amount of time, freeing you up for more in-depth analyses. Below are just a few examples of how LENA Pro has been used to answer some interesting research questions. Variation in a Child’s MLU Throughout the Day Have you ever wondered how much a child’s MLU, Mean Length of Utterance, can fluctuate throughout the day? To find out, we transcribed a 12-hour file for a 31-month-old girl. Based on previous research, we would expect an MLU of around 2.5 for a 2½-year-old. The X-axis in this plot shows the elapsed time in the file (i.e., 0:00 is when the recorder was turned on first thing in the morning, around 6:30 a.m., and 12:00 is 12 hours later, around 6:30 p.m.). The Y-axis shows MLU calculated over 50 utterances: 1–50, 2–51, etc. The child’s MLU peaks within the first ½ hour of the recording, up to nearly 9, and, other than nap time, it’s at its lowest (around 2.75) while she’s at preschool, showing that even her lowest MLU was higher than the expected 2.5.
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Comparing Children’s Conversational InteractionsHere we compared LENA data for three children: two typically developing children and one child with Autism Spectrum Disorder. We found that the child with autism exhibited more child monologues than the two typically developing children, and he also initiated the most turns with adults. By contrast, the typically developing children engaged in and initiated more conversations with other children.
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Research Application Examples (cont.)
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Child Monologues Turns between Child and Other Children
Child-Initiated Turns with Other Children
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Clinical and Intervention Application Examples
As a clinician you may be interested in knowing more about a child’s home language environment, preschool environment, or maybe you want to know whether or not a child’s audio environment supports the types of goals you’ve set for a family. Here are a few examples of different types of information LENA can give you.
Adult Word Counts During Therapy and Non-Therapy Days The figure below demonstrates the use of LENA to examine a child’s language environment at the micro level, in this case adult word counts during therapy and outside of therapy for a participant from the Childhood Autism Study. Adult word counts displayed at five-minute intervals over the course of an entire day clearly show the impact of treatment. In fact, roughly half of the total adult speech in the child’s environment on the therapy day occurred during the two hours or so of treatment.
When we looked at information from our autism study in aggregate we found the same results illustrated in the case study above. Adult Word Counts are higher during therapy times compared to non-therapy times, and the same results hold for conversational turns and child vocalizations (Warren et al., JADD, 2010).
9 AM 10 AM 11 AM 12 PM 1 PM 2 PM 3 PM 4 PM 5 PM 6 PM 7 PM 8 PM 9 PM 0
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LENATM Pro Users
Akron UniversityArizona State UniversityAugustana College Brigham Young UniversityBrown UniversityCalifornia State University, East BayChapman UniversityColorado State UniversityEast Carolina UniversityEast Tennessee State UniversityFlorida International UniversityFlorida State UniversityGeorgia State UniversityHarding UniversityIndiana University, BloomingtonIndiana University School of MedicineJames Madison UniversityKean UniversityKent State University McGill University, Canada Michigan State UniversityMontclair State UniversityNazareth College of RochesterNewcastle University, UKNorthwestern UniversityNorthern Arizona UniversityNorwegian University of Science and Technology, NorwayOakland UniversityOhio State UniversityOld Dominion UniversityPurdue UniversityRadboud University, The NetherlandsRadford UniversityRIDBC Renwick Centre, Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children/ University of Newcastle, AustraliaSaint Mary’s CollegeSan Diego State University Southeast Missouri State University, Autism Center for Diagnosis and TreatmentSouthern Illinois UniversityStanford UniversitySt. Cloud State UniversityTennessee State UniversityTexas Christian UniversityUniversity of Alberta University of ArizonaUniversity of Arkansas, Little Rock
University of BuffaloUniversity of California, Los Angeles University of ChicagoUniversity of Colorado, BoulderUniversity of Georgia, AthensUniversity of Iowa University of Kansas, Juniper Gardens Children’s ProjectUniversity of Manchester, UKUniversity of Manitoba, CanadaUniversity of Massachusetts University of MemphisUniversity of MichiganUniversity of MinnesotaUniversity of Minnesota, Urban Research and Outreach Engagement CenterUniversity of MontanaUniversity of Nebraska, KearneyUniversity of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, FPG Child Development Institute University of North Carolina, Greensboro University of Northern ColoradoUniversity of Pennsylvania (IBIS Infant Brain Imaging Study)University of PittsburghUniversity of Rochester University of Sheffield, UKUniversity of South AlabamaUniversity of Tennessee Health Science Center University of Tennessee-KnoxvilleUniversity of Texas at DallasUniversity of ToledoUniversity of Virginia University of WashingtonUniversity of Washington, Autism Center (IBIS Infant Brain Imaging Study)University of West GeorgiaUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison, Waisman CenterUniversity of Wollongong, AustraliaUniversity of WyomingUrsinus CollegeUtah State UniversityValdosta State University Vanderbilt UniversityWashington University, School of MedicineWestern Oregon University
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Universities and Colleges
About LENA
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Our Mission: Close the GapOur mission at the LENA Research Foundation is to improve the home language environments of disadvantaged children 0-5 by developing advanced technology to accelerate language development and for the research and treatment of language delays and disorders. At heart, our mission is to close the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
Automatic, Objective, and InexpensiveIn the United States, millions of dollars are spent on programs to improve the home language environments of disadvantaged children 0-5. There are additional millions of dollars spent on doctors, clinicians, and speech-language professionals to treat children with language delays and disorders, including autism. In virtually all the programs the primary treatment is the same: It’s to teach parents to talk more, converse more, and read more books to their children. However, before LENA there was not a means to automatically, objectively, and inexpensively measure whether these interventions were working; there was no good way to measure the fidelity of treatment or to provide frequent, objective feedback to parents on words and conversational turns so they could take charge to improve the language environment of their child.
LENA provides parents and caregivers with objective feedback on words and turns and can be used as a tool to coach them to talk more, read more, and converse more with their young children. LENA gives intervention consultants and clinicians the ability to objectively monitor the fidelity of treatment to continuously improve intervention effectiveness. LENA also provides the means to frequently measure improvement in language development and to document intervention success. LENA can help to dramatically reduce the cost of screening and diagnosing children with language delays and disorders including autism. LENA provides child development researchers a new low-cost, unobtrusive measurement tool to discover what is really going on in the natural language environments of children.
Help Guide LENA Pro Product DevelopmentEach new version of LENA Pro features new additions or modifications that have been requested by LENA users. Please send requests or suggestions for improving the research capabilities of the system to [email protected].
The LENA Research Foundation is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) charitable organization.
