The LENA System Applied to Swedish: Reliability of the Adult Word Count Estimate

Abstract

The Language Environment Analysis system LENA TM is used to capture day-long recordings of children's natural audio environment. The system performs automated segmentation of the recordings and provides estimates for various measures. One of those measures is Adult Word Count (AWC), an approximation of the number of words spoken by adults in close proximity to the child. The LENA system was developed for and trained on American English, but it has also been evaluated on its performance when applied to Spanish, Mandarin and French. The present study is the first evaluation of the LENA system applied to Swedish, and focuses on the AWC estimate. Twelve five-minute segments were selected at random from each of four day-long recordings of 30-month-old children. Each of these 48 segments was transcribed by two transcribers, and both number of words and number of vowels were calculated (inter-transcriber reliability for words: r = .95, vowels: r = .93). Both counts correlated with the LENA system's AWC estimate for the same segments (words: r = .67, vowels: r = .66). The reliability of the AWC as estimated by the LENA system when applied to Swedish is therefore comparable to its reliability for Spanish, Mandarin and French.

Growing Up in a Digital World – Digital Media and the Association With the Child’s Language Development at Two Years of Age

“…Due to technical difficulties, one recording was only 4h and was not included in the final sample. The reliability of LENA was originally established for American English but has also been evaluated in other languages, such as Swedish ( Schwarz et al, 2017 ), showing that comparison within the same language will yield comparable results.…”

The Natural Language Environment of 9-Month-Old Infants in Sweden and Concurrent Association With Early Language Development

“…LENA was originally developed for American English and has so far been found to be reliable (albeit slightly less so than for American English) for Spanish, Mandarin, and French (Weisleder and Fernald, 2013;Gilkerson et al, 2015;Canault et al, 2016). In Swedish, only the variable AWC has previously been evaluated, and showed reliability similar to that of other non-English studies (Schwarz et al, 2017). Thus, it is likely that the lack of difference in AWC in the current study compared to Gilkerson et al (2017) is also reliable and indicates that the parents of 9-month-old infants in Sweden talk as much as their American counterparts.…”

“…In recent years, it has changed rapidly with increased access to, and use of, digital media. Technological tools like the Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) system have dramatically improved the accuracy and ease of measurement of children’s language environment in their natural home settings ( Schwarz et al, 2017 ). The purpose of the current study was to measure using LENA the natural home language environment of 9-month-old infants in Sweden and to investigate the concurrent association with language development for the first time in this age group.…”

Diarization in Maximally Ecological Recordings: Data from Tsimane Children

“…Nonetheless, researchers did try to assess accuracy for their language. However, evaluation for talker diarization performance specifically also tends to be limited, as researchers' interest typically focus on global language input metrics, such as rough estimations of the number of adult words or syllables recorded in a day [11,12,13,14,15].…”