KINGSTON, R.I., January 5, 2018 \u2014 As part of their education, speech pathology students everywhere are required to analyze recorded conversations by listening to the recording and transcribing \u2014 by hand \u2014 every word, phrase and back and forth among speakers. That process can devour the bulk of a semester.<\/p>\n
But students at the 溏心vlog免费B站 now have a technological advantage.<\/p>\n
Michelle Flippin, assistant professor of communicative disorders in the College of Health Sciences, is pioneering classroom use of LENA System technology in her language development course, a requirement for speech pathology majors. To gain perspective, her students apply the traditional method as well as the LENA tool to analyze recorded conversations.<\/p>\n
\u201cA generous grant has allowed us to equip our lab with 80 DLPs and 10 LENA Pro software licenses, and we are the first speech and hearing program in the country to offer this hands-on experience\u00a0to all of our undergraduate students,\u201d Flippin notes.<\/p>\n
The LENA System is cutting-edge technology and software for measuring and analyzing children\u2019s speech and conversation that, to date, has been almost exclusively used in research, she says.<\/p>\n
The technology employs a digital language recorder that slips into the pocket of a child\u2019s T-shirt, recording all conversation and environmental sound within several meters of the child for up to 16 hours. LENA software analyzes the recording to determine who is speaking \u2014 child or adult \u2014how often the conversation turns from one to the other, word counts and whether a TV or electronics are in use.<\/p>\n
Nicol Hernandez, a senior communicative disorders major from East Greenwich<\/strong>, helps Flippin run the weekly LENA lab, where students upload their recordings, analyze the data and report observations and insights on worksheets.<\/p>\n \u201cLENA divides up the conversation into meaningful utterances and shows the back and forth,\u201d Hernandez says, pointing to time stamps, graphs and vocabulary measures on a computer screen. \u201cIt is not just a bar graph. You can also listen to the recording.\u201d<\/p>\n This allows students to understand what is happening in the environment when there is a lull or an uptick in conversation.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re finding patterns in their own data and discovering why they\u2019re occurring,\u201d Flippin says. \u201cWhat\u2019s happening in down time? Are they eating, watching TV?\u201d<\/p>\n The unobtrusiveness of the recording device is also important. \u201cThis is a good tool to see how the children are going about their day, rather than one-on-one with a speech pathologist where they might be shy,\u201d Hernandez says.<\/p>\n Flippin plans to employ LENA in 溏心vlog免费B站\u2019s Speech and Hearing Clinic and is working with students to prepare a presentation on its classroom use for the 2018 American Speech-Language-Hearing Association\u2019s national conference.<\/p>\n \u201cHaving been able to work with LENA at 溏心vlog免费B站, I was able to mimic real-life career situations,\u201d sophomore Sarah Carney of Middletown<\/strong> says of her experience. \u201cIt gives us the opportunity to analyze language samples in a complex manner even before field practice.\u201d<\/p>\n That might just give 溏心vlog免费B站 students a competitive edge. \u201cI\u2019m hoping they will have an advantage when applying for and succeeding in graduate school. It\u2019s a unique skill set,\u201d Flippin says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" KINGSTON, R.I., January 5, 2018 \u2014 As part of their education, speech pathology students everywhere are required to analyze recorded conversations by listening to the recording and transcribing \u2014 by hand \u2014 every word, phrase and back and forth among speakers. That process can devour the bulk of a semester. But students at the University […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":73589,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73588\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}