Conversational Turns Report

The Conversational Turns report provides an estimate of the total number of conversational turn-taking interactions the child engages in with an adult.  A turn can occur in isolation, and turns can accumulate within a longer conversation.  A conversation is a contiguous region containing live human speech separated from the next conversation by a pause of at least 5 seconds.  A pause is a region that contains no live human speech audio signals.  

  • LENA counts a conversational turn when a key child vocalization segment and an adult word segment are separated by less than 5 seconds and by no other human speaker segment.
  • Either party may initiate the turn.  The child vocalization can be followed by adult words, or vice versa.
  • Turns are counted in pairs only.  Child-Adult get a turn count of 1 (as would Adult-Child).  Child-Adult-Child also receives a count of 1, but Child-Adult-Child-Adult counts as 2 turns.
  • Overlapping speech segments, coughs, cries, and other vegetative and fixed signals do not contribute to the Conversational Turns estimate.
  • Conversational turns do not cross conversation boundaries.
  • This report does not identify who initiated the turns, but that information can be gleaned from the ITS file and ADEX.
  • The Conversational Turns report also displays AVA data and flags any day for which the AVA score suggests a possible language delay.  
  • Please refer to our Technical Reports for more information on the development of this and other LENA system measures.

Orientation to the Conversational Turns report.

The software plots conversational turns on a chart for easy viewing.  The vertical axis represents the total number of turns per time interval.  The horizontal axis displays the interval for which data exist.

The Conversational Turns report contains all of the following features described elsewhere in this chapter:

  1. drop-down child list for easy navigation among children
  2. time interval selector to control the viewing resolution
  3. date selector bar (scroll bar and drop-down calendar) to select the date and/or time of interest
  4. audio clip playback and export options at the 5-minute level
  5. print report button
  6. export data button
  7. report navigation buttons for easy navigation among one child's reports
Orientation to the Conversational Turns report.

Conversational Turns data are displayed as follows:

Actual turns per 5-minute interval.

Actual turns per 5-minute interval.

Actual turns per hour.

Actual turns per hour.

Actual count per day, projected 12-hour count and percentile for any recording day >10 hours, plus Automatic Vocalization Assessment scores for eligible recordings.

Actual count per day, projected 12-hour count and percentile for any recording day >10 hours, plus Automatic Vocalization Assessment scores for eligible recordings.

Any purple dot represents the 12-hour projected count.

Percentile and projected values will read N/A for recordings less than 10 hours long, and the corresponding dot will be gray.

 

A recording day is flagged for possible language delay when the AVA score is 1.5 standard deviations below the mean.  Flagged recording days are represented by a yellow data point:

Averaged actual counts per month, plus averaged projected 12-hour counts and percentiles if applicable.

Averaged actual counts per month, plus averaged projected 12-hour counts and percentiles if applicable.

The yellow and purple Possible Language Delay marker appears when at least one recording from the month was flagged for an AVA score at least 1.5 standard deviations from the mean.  Otherwise, the point will be purple.

The link is located in the report information panel, which can be hidden or shown using the arrow button.

(Image displayed here has been reduced for context - you won't really need a magnifying glass to read it!)

Link to normative table for comparison.