How LENA Pro could transform research and clinical treatment of children who are deaf or hard of hearing
Posted by Mia Moe on Thu, Mar 04, 2010 @ 03:46 PM
Christine Yoshinaga-Itano, Ph.D., CCC-A, Professor, Dept. of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at University of Colorado, Boulder, talks about the LENA Pro system's potential to help discover new treatments for infants and children who are deaf or hard of hearing.
Imagine the Possibilities
How LENA Pro could transform research and clinical treatment of children who are deaf or hard of hearing
LENA Pro has the ability to revolutionize the way that we chart the developmental language progress of children with hearing loss. The system provides language environment analysis data that would be almost impossible to acquire without significant financial resources for recording, transcription, and coding analysis. With this unique speech recognition tool, speech language professionals and families of children with hearing loss have the opportunity to access feedback on spoken language use and language environment almost immediately.
This is a welcome improvement over the recent past, when teachers, interventional specialists, and habilitation and rehabilitation providers were never quite sure whether the strategies they were teaching or recommending were actually being generalized into everyday life. Moreover, the reports and data generated from the LENA recordings provide speech language professionals and parents with access to the concise information that they need to custom tailor their treatment efforts.
Furthermore, the research tools in LENA Pro allow us to estimate how much language the child with a hearing loss is exposed to within the daily language environment. We can compare this information with the estimated language access of a child with normal hearing at the same age level. The device also enables us to look at the child's conversational turns and the adult's conversational turns and to identify times and/or activities during the day that facilitate the best language interactions. In-depth analysis of these interactions is now possible by combining the computer analysis with traditional - but time- and personnel-intensive - language sampling procedures.
With LENA Pro, we now have technology that will help us figure out what is working and what is not. And this level of insight is bound to open new doors for research and clinical practice.