Date of Award

8-2024

Document Type

Campus Access Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Clinical Psychology

First Advisor

Alice S. Carter

Second Advisor

Abbey Eisenhower

Third Advisor

Paul J. Yoder

Abstract

Clinical language assessments often play an important role in determining the type of services children with early indicators of autism receive, especially within the context of federally legislated Early Intervention (EI) programs. Although these standardized assessments provide essential knowledge about children’s language ability, they are inherently limited in that they only sample a restricted amount of the child’s language and often take place outside of the child’s natural language environment. In this study, we assess the potential of using language processing technology - the Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) system - as supplemental clinical information regarding children’s linguistic capabilities and natural language environments. LENA consists of a digital recorder, which is worn on the child’s chest, and records daylong in-home samples of children’s linguistic input and output. LENA software processes the language recordings and generates the following five distinct linguistic variables: 1. adult word count (AWC): how many times an adult vocalized during the session, 2. child vocalization count (CVC): how many times the key child vocalized during the session, 3. conversational turn count (CTC): how many times a key child and adult engaged in two-step sequential vocalizations, 4. vocal productivity (VP): a standard score based on normative data from typically-developing 2-to-48-month-old toddlers indicating how the average number of canonical syllables per utterance compares to the peer average number of canonical syllables per utterance, and 5. automatic vocalization assessment (AVA): a standard score based on normative data indicating the degree to which the phonemic composition and distribution of children’s vocalizations are similar to the phonemic composition and distribution of children of a similar chronological age. Although preliminary evidence of LENA’s clinical utility is promising, no studies to date have examined stability or test-retest reliability for all five of these LENA variables in the same participant sample, nor have they examined concurrent associations among variables or in relation to standard assessments of language. The current study is designed to address gaps in literature with two aims. The first aim is to evaluate test-retest reliability of a subsample of participants with two valid proximal recordings (n=101). The second aim is to examine associations between all five automatically-generated LENA variables - AWC, CVC, CTC, VP, & AVA - and two clinical assessments of language commonly used among children with social communication delays: the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales, Third Edition (VABS-III) and the MacArthur Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI): Vocabulary Checklist in a sample of children showing early signs of autism aged 16-33 months (N=128).

Comments

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