The classroom at the Northeast Community Action Partnership Early Head Start was part of a five-week program that uses the recorders — often called talk pedometers — to gather data on teacher-child interactions and train their educators to guide them toward longer, more in-depth conversations. The program is offered by the national nonprofit , or Language Environment Analysis, which uses the technology to research young children’s language skills.

The Buffett Early Childhood Institute, an education research center at the University of Nebraska, partnered with seven rural and urban Head Start locations to use Lena technology this spring with more than 1,300 children. It was Nebraska’s first statewide implementation, funded by a five-year, $1.3 million geared toward helping states create programming to improve child literacy skills.

Lena has existed as a research nonprofit for more than two decades, but its professional development program, Lena Grow, started about six years ago. Last year, Florida lawmakers to provide Lena Grow to more than 400 preschools. The program has been over the past two years with a $3.2 million grant. Tennessee currently uses the technology in more than .

“It’s such a huge opportunity to be able to utilize these grant funds because it sets a really wonderful foundation for [children] as they enter kindergarten,” said Paula Thompson, a University of Nebraska-Kearney professor and one of the grant project directors. “It will hopefully have positive outcomes as we look toward that ultimate goal of increasing third grade proficiency.”

The work follows decades of discussion over how preschoolers best learn language. 

A found a dramatic difference in the number of words heard by children, depending on their family’s income — often referred to as the 30-million-word gap. has found that it’s not so much the number of words children hear, but the quality of the language they are exposed to.

Researchers have that talk and interaction between adults and children in their first few years of life often impacts future cognitive development and academic achievement. This engagement is measured in “conversational turns,” or the back-and-forth exchange of words between children and adults. 

“The term ‘serve and return’ is kind of a basic analogy for these conversational turn-taking events,” Thompson said. “It’s been a foundation in language and literacy for years, and we just continue to strive toward better understanding it.” 

Lena records and collects data about conversational turns through the device in each child’s purple vest. Daycares, preschools and Head Start centers use the data and training to increase the number of conversational turns between adults and children.

Lena Grow was designed to be used by all children in a classroom, but it is especially helpful for kids who don’t talk much or are at risk of — meaning they get fewer than five back-and-forth exchanges with an adult per hour. An of 33,256 children using Lena Grow found that 13% experienced language isolation.

“The way to improve literacy is actually to invest in and support language development in these early years,” said Alexandra Daro, director of applied research for the Buffett Institute. “The more back and forth you can get in a particular conversation, the better children are able to pick up on the language that you’re using.”

A child’s use of conversational turns has been to early literacy skills, social development and IQ scores. 

A June shows that the 51 children who participated in Nebraska’s initial Lena Grow program increased their conversational turns by 21% over the course of five weeks — from 33.5 to 40.6 per hour.

Children in center-based childcare average 15 hourly turns, but an optimal early talk environment is roughly 40, according to Lena. Youngsters who began Nebraska’s Lena Grow program with fewer than 15 hourly conversational turns boosted their talk by 111%, from an average of 9.7 to 20.5.

During the professional development program, early childhood centers have the children wear their vests one day per week. The recorder collects the number of conversational turns per child, in whatever language they are speaking, while the teacher continues the day like normal.

Norfolk educator Cassie Niedig said the data brought attention to children the adults weren’t talking to as much, such as Elvis, a 3-year-old who is nonverbal. It also showed that some toddlers were vocalizing words but not creating conversational turns with adults.

“I thought I was talking to Elvis a lot,” she said. “I didn’t realize how much more we talked to Marlo versus the other [children] — he’s our best talker because he’s the oldest. But even though he’s talking a lot, it’s not necessarily with conversational turns.”

Niedig said the toddlers loved the vests when they were first introduced to them, but there have been struggles because the children are so young. 

“We’ve had a couple of issues just because they want you to let them play, and they don’t want to have to put them on. But otherwise, we’ve had a great time with it,” she said. “We just let them talk, and I do not treat it any differently than a normal day other than trying to focus on whatever goal we are focusing on that week.”

One student with sensory issues struggled wearing one at first, but got used to it within a couple of hours. Placing stickers on the front of the vests also helped the kids warm up to the idea of wearing them once a week.

At Dodge County Head Start in Fremont, Nebraska, the 5-year-olds in the Lena program were excited to wear their vests, said Brittany Brown, a Head Start education specialist. One boy said the bulky recorder on the front made him feel like Iron Man — the device reminded him of the glowing reactor in the center of the superhero’s suit.

“They feel a little empowered, and they really like having it — there’s no hesitancy to put the vest on,” Brown said.

After a day of recording, the data is uploaded and analyzed. Then, a Lena coach — often a local staff member trained by the nonprofit — teaches the educators participating in the program ways to increase the number of turns. 

“The teacher is able to see if there is a certain hour where there’s a dip, and they’re able to discuss with their coaches ways to increase those conversational turns throughout the day,” said Rocy O’Keefe, the nonprofit’s chief growth officer.

During the coaching sessions, educators choose strategies to implement in the classroom. For example, Lena recommends that while teachers talk, read or sing with a child, they should comment on what the student is doing, name things the child is interested in, wait for responses, imitate them or get down on the children’s eye level so interactions are face-to-face.

“The coaches will work with teachers to set a goal based on the observations of the data — either a classroom average goal, or they are looking at individual children who might need some individualized attention,” Daro said. “Then the teachers practice throughout the rest of the week.”

Amy Bloomquist, coaching coordinator and area manager, was trained by Lena to be a coach for the Norfolk Head Start program. She said teachers have responded well to working on a specific topic each week to increase conversational turns. They also talk to families about the program after parents have given permission for their child to wear the recording device. 

“Each week they’re sending an informational flyer home with the families, sparking some conversation between the teachers and the families,” she said. “They’re also giving them some tips on how to increase conversational turns at home.”

In Nebraska, 22 Head Start centers are eligible to participate in the program, and Thompson said the Buffett Institute hopes to work with as many as it can by the end of the five-year grant. Its main goals for the next few years are not only for Nebraska children to improve their conversational turns, but for Lena Grow to increase 4-year-olds’ literacy scores on an assessment of early childhood development called Teaching Strategies Gold, or TS Gold. Lena Grow has been to improve language and literacy scores on these assessments in other states, such as Wisconsin, Florida, Ohio and Washington, D.C. 

“The dream goal is to also eventually be able to work with the school districts that these kids are entering into to look at improvement in TS Gold [scores] as they transition into kindergarten,” Daro said. “So, big dreams, but that’s what we’re going for.”

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation and Overdeck Family Foundation provide financial support to Lena and ����Ӱ��.

Both research teams used the nonprofit LENA’s to glean their findings. The wearable device delivers detailed information on what children hear throughout the day. It measures the number of words spoken near the child in addition to the child’s own language-related vocalizations.

It also counts child-adult interactions, called “conversational turns,” which both research groups say are critical to language acquisition.

“It is the conversational turns that drive brain development,” said Brown’s Sean Deoni, adding he’s concerned for the long-term success of children born after the pandemic began. 

The joint finding is the latest of discovered when researchers compared babies born before and after COVID. 

Deoni is principal investigator at Brown’s Advanced Baby Imaging Lab. He and other staffers there first spotted the problem when they noticed that children who visited the lab after March 2020 took longer to complete cognitive tasks.

“They were not as attentive, or at least not performing as well as we normally have seen,” Deoni said. It was this change that prompted him to take a new look at various data points gathered from the nearly 800 children his facility has worked with in recent years. After examining their neuroimaging and neurocognitive results, he and his team found child motor and language scores decreased sharply in 2021 and 2022, prompting them to search for an explanation for the decline.

The inquiry led them to analyze information gathered from children ages 12 and 16 months who were born before 2019 — well before the COVID outbreak — and after July 2020, months into its spread. The results showed a major drop in verbal functioning between the two groups. Those born after COVID demonstrated slower verbal growth over time.

Tests showed, too, these babies experienced a significantly slower rate of white matter development versus the children from studies done before the pandemic.

“White matter is basically the wiring of the brain,” Deoni said. “It’s what carries information throughout the brain and to different cortical regions where it is processed. White matter damage, for example, is a hallmark of multiple sclerosis. Reduced white matter development is associated with reduced cognitive development.”

Deoni and his team also found a significant drop in adult words per hour and conversational turns between the two groups of children. The deficit will have a significant impact on kids he said, citing his own group’s earlier research. 

Neither research team focused on the cause of the drop in caregiver interactions with babies, only the outcome, though Deoni cited the heightened stress, depression and burnout associated with the pandemic as possible explanations. 

Jill Gilkerson, a linguist specializing in early language acquisition and LENA’s chief research and evaluation officer, said the reasons might differ from one household to the next. 

“I don’t think we are going to be able to find a single cause to point to, and I’m not sure that we need to,” she said. “We hope this data validates concerns caregivers may be having, helps them know they are not alone in those feelings and furthers the conversation about the need to invest in support for families at every level.”

LENA’s study showed child vocalizations dropped significantly across all groups of children, but particularly among those from the lowest socioeconomic level. The frequency of caregiver/child conversations also decreased dramatically, particularly among children from the poorest families, it found.

“It’s often the case that when these adverse events happen, it’s those who are already the most vulnerable that are hit the hardest… and I think that we are seeing this here,” Gilkerson said.

The connection between economic security and language acquisition was very much a pre-pandemic concern as well. A found that children growing up in low-income households hear 30 million fewer words than their peers from high-income backgrounds. A 2018 study raised questions about the extent of the gap, but the science is clear that children’s first three years are the most critical time for brain development.

LENA, based in Boulder, Colorado and founded in 2004, aims to improve children’s futures through early talk technology and data-driven programs. Its software measures a child’s language environment and provides feedback to parents and professionals vested in preparing them for school.

Its study of 136 COVID-era babies included only those who started gestating on or after the start of the pandemic in mid-March 2020: All were born after December 15 of that year. The findings from this group were compared to a pre-COVID pool, which captured recordings between 2017 and March 2020 and included 494 kids.

These language deficits, once shared with caregivers, are possible to correct. But, Gilkerson said, it’s important for groups like hers to suggest practical, easily applicable solutions.

“We need to … provide parents with strategies for integrating talk — interactive talk, quality talk — with their children during their regular routine,” she said, rather than add a new task to their already stress-filled lives.

LENA’s latest research builds off earlier findings the group published in the journal in October 2018: That study showed early talk and interaction, particularly for children ages 18 to 24 months, can predict school-age language and cognitive outcomes. In that paper, LENA examined day-long audio recordings for 146 infants and toddlers completed monthly for six months.

LENA’s Language Environment Analysis software measured the total number of adult words and adult-child conversations. LENA conducted follow-up evaluations at 9 to 14 years of age. It concluded that adult-child conversations influence a child’s IQ, verbal comprehension and vocabulary scores 10 years later.

And while it’s true, both researchers acknowledged, that children are resilient, recent data does not yet reflect the bounceback from the pandemic.

“We are not seeing them hit a floor and all progressively get better,” Deoni said. “We are seeing them continue this downward trend.”

And it’s not just a language acquisition problem. Reduced verbal development is being driven by poor motor development, Deoni said: This early foundational skill could have a lasting impact on children, one that can be hard to correct for as they age.

“I’m worried about how we set things up going forward such that our early childhood teachers and early childhood interventionalists are prepared for what is potentially a set of children who maybe aren’t performing as we expect them to,” he said.