ArticleBehavior research methods2021
Circumspection in using automated measures: Talker gender and addressee affect error rates for adult speech detection in the Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) system.
Article in Behavior research methods, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Classification errors distort findings in automated speech processing: Examples and solutions from child-development research.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Dynamic Interaction of Affect and Language in Children's Home Environments.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Conversation Initiation in Families With a Toddler Who Is Deaf or Hard of Hearing.American journal of speech-language pathology · 2025Article
- The everyday speech environments of preschoolers with and without cochlear implants.Journal of child language · 2025Article
- Validation of the Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) Automated Speech Processing Algorithm Labels for Adult and Child Segments in a Sample of Families From India.Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · 2025Article
- A comparison of automatic and manual measures of turn-taking in monolingual and bilingual contexts.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Fathers' unmodulated prosody in child-directed speech.The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2023Article
- Language Exposure for Preterm Infants is Reduced Relative to Fetuses.The Journal of pediatrics · 2023Article
- Factors of parental investment in the home language environment in peri-urban China: A mixed methods study.PloS one · 2023Article
- Objectively measured teacher and preschooler vocalizations: Phonemic diversity is associated with language abilities.Developmental science · 2022Article
- A Framework for Understanding the Relation Between Spoken Language Input and Outcomes for Children with Cochlear Implants.Child development perspectives · 2022Article
- The home environment and its relation to vocalizations in the first year of life.Pediatric medicine (Hong Kong, China) · 2022Article
- Vocal development in a large-scale crosslinguistic corpus.Developmental science · 2021Article
- Investigating Children's Interactions in Preschool Classrooms: An Overview of Research Using Automated Sensing Technologies.Early childhood research quarterlyArticle
- The State of Natural Language Sampling in Autism Research: A Scoping Review.Autism & developmental language impairmentsReview
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Automatic speech processing devices have become popular for quantifying amounts of ambient language input to children in their home environments. We assessed error rates for language input estimates for the Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) audio processing system, asking whether error rates differed as a function of adult talkers' gender and whether they were speaking to children or adults. Audio was sampled from within LENA recordings from 23 families with children aged 4-34 months. Human coders identified vocalizations by adults and children, counted intelligible words, and determined whether adults' speech was addressed to children or adults. LENA's classification accuracy was assessed by parceling audio into 100-ms frames and comparing, for each frame, human and LENA classifications. LENA correctly classified adult speech 67% of the time across families (average false negative rate: 33%). LENA's adult word count showed a mean +47% error relative to human counts. Classification and Adult Word Count error rates were significantly affected by talkers' gender and whether speech was addressed to a child or an adult. The largest systematic errors occurred when adult females addressed children. Results show LENA's classifications and Adult Word Count entailed random - and sometimes large - errors across recordings, as well as systematic errors as a function of talker gender and addressee. Due to systematic and sometimes high error in estimates of amount of adult language input, relying on this metric alone may lead to invalid clinical and/or research conclusions. Further validation studies and circumspect usage of LENA are warranted.
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