Assessing Children's Home Language Environments using LENA

What is it about?

We collected 12 hour-long, digital audio recordings for 30 typically developing infants and toddlers to assess differences in home language environments. Similar to the work of Hart and Risley, we found vast differences in the amount of adult words spoken to the children across recordings. Children with a more talkative parent also produced more vocalizations and conversational turns. Unlike the findings of Hart and Risely, we did not find statistically significant SES differences in amount of adult talk. One new finding was that adult females rather than males provided the majority of words heard by their child.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

This work is important because the language sampling technology allows for greater daily sampling, longer samples, and a method to analyze a large amount of data at a more cost-effective and efficient manner