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Socioeconomic status correlates with measures of Language Environment Analysis (LENA) system: a meta-analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 June 2021

Leonardo PIOT*
Affiliation:
Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et de Psycholinguistique, Département d'Etudes cognitives, ENS, EHESS, CNRS, PSL University, France
Naomi HAVRON
Affiliation:
Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et de Psycholinguistique, Département d'Etudes cognitives, ENS, EHESS, CNRS, PSL University, France University of Haifa, Israel
Alejandrina CRISTIA
Affiliation:
Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et de Psycholinguistique, Département d'Etudes cognitives, ENS, EHESS, CNRS, PSL University, France
*
Address for correspondence: Leonardo Piot, 29 rue d'Ulm, 75005, Paris, France. E-mail: leo1997p@gmail.com
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Abstract

Using a meta-analytic approach, we evaluate the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and children's experiences measured with the Language Environment Analysis (LENA) system. Our final analysis included 22 independent samples, representing data from 1583 children. A model controlling for LENATM measures, age and publication type revealed an effect size of rz= .186, indicating a small effect of SES on children's language experiences. The type of LENA metric measured emerged as a significant moderator, indicating stronger effects for adult word counts than child vocalization counts. These results provide important evidence for the strength of association between SES and children's everyday language experiences as measured with an unobtrusive recording analyzed automatically in a standardized fashion.

Information

Type
Brief Research Report
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press
Figure 0

Figure 1. PRISMA Flowchart indicating studies discovered, screened, and included. “No SES” indicates studies that do not report any measures of SES and/or SES too homogeneous (>80% of participants in the same SES group) and/or SES was confounded with another variable. “No T.D. group” indicates there was no group data for typically-developing children specifically. “No participants” indicates that no participants were recruited for the study. “Specific env./time” indicates that LENA devices were only used during specific times of the day (e.g., meal-time) or specific environments (e.g., NICU). “Manipulated LENA” indicates that LENA metrics were transformed (e.g., AWC was divided in child-directed and adult-directed speech). “Same dataset” indicates that the study's dataset was the same as in another study. “No English” indicates that the paper was not written in English.

Figure 1

Table 1. Included studies. Studies identified by first author name and year regardless of the number of authors, except for the three corpora from HomeBank, identified by the corpus name. “Sample” indicates characteristics of the infant sample. “LENA” indicates characteristics of the LENA recordings (“est.” stands for estimate, “h” for hourly, “12h” for 12h projection, “raw 16h” for the raw 16h counts, “z12h” for the z-scored 12h projection, “pcl” for percentiles). SES indicates characteristics of the SES measures (range); “S.D.” indicates socioeconomic deprivation, “HI” Hollingshead Index, “composite” a composite measure created by the researchers.

Figure 2

Figure 2. Funnel plot showing, for each study, its standard error as a function of its effect size. True studies are in black; those imputed by the trim-and-fill method are shown in white.