Browsing by Subject "ääniympäristö"

Objectives. Preterm infants spend the beginning of their lives in newborn intensive care units (NICU). The sound environment preterm infants experience in NICU differs from the typical one in uterus. It is known that the sound environment in the early stages of life affects in preterm infants language development which is why the research of the early sound environment is important. Language Environment Analysis system (LENA) is an automated tool for recording and analysing language environments. The objective of this study is to evaluate the validity of LENA system in Finnish speaking and NICU environments. LENA system gives automatically values for following variables: male and female words, total of adult words, vocalizations, conversational turns and silence. Values given by LENA system will be compared with human coder estimates. The validity of LENA system has not been studied inclusively in NICU and there is only few studies in Finnish speaking environment. This master's thesis is part of the LangLENA study and some of the data analyzes performed in this work were used as a reliability analysis in an already published article that evaluates the validity of LENA system (Ståhlberg‐Forsén, ym., 2021). Methods. Research material of this master´s thesis consisted of 30 minute recordings from four children. Recordings had been gathered by LENA system in NICU. 30 minute recordings were picked from a longer material by using parental closeness diaries to ensure parents speak in the recordings. Research material was collected in LangLENA research project. Human coder and LENA estimates agreements were compared by calculating intraclass correlation values ICC (3,1) for every variable. Results and conclusions. According to this research it seemed that LENA system provides valid information from total number of adult and male words in Finnish NICU environment but the information on female words, vocalizations, conversational turns and silence is not valid. Due to the small amount of data, the results of the study cannot be generalized. However according to this and former studies it seems that LENA system is a valid method to examinate the amount of adult speak in Finnish environment but not a valid method to examinate the amount of vocalizations, conversational turns and silence in NICU environment.