TOOLS

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• Computer programs for automatically analyzing LENA data (ITS files with or without accompanying WAV files) are available on the HomeBank repository at GitHub. Functions served by these tools include:
  • Getting total frequencies of various event types within a recording
  • Tabulating start and end times of child and adult vocalizations
  • Finding out if a speaker received a response from another speaker type
  • Saving or playing all the individual WAV files for a given speaker within a recording
  • Running acoustic analyses in Praat on the key child segments within a recording

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• A tool for conversion of LENA files into CHAT format is now available as a tool called LENA2CHAT within the CLAN program. The CLAN CHAT file is more compliant with CHAT conventions and is easier to read than the version that the LENA system exports. CLANis available online. The command to perform the conversion is lena2chat *.cha The chat format of the files retains the following information from the its file:
  • speaker
  • db values (db full scale, normalized with respect to the possible amplitudes that the device can record) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBFS
  • pause block beginnings and endings (using @Bg and @End, along with a running count of how many pause blocks there are)
  • conversation block beginnings and endings (using @Bg and @End, along with a running count along with a running count of how many convo blocks there)

  What the chat format does not include that the its files do include is summarized conversation-block-level statistics (which are just aggregations over the data that both its and chat files do have).

  
  

  More specifically, the lena2chat command is run in CLAN over an .its file:
  
  Once you hit 'run' you get a lena file, e.g. sample_lena_file_from_its.cha. Here is a bit of an its file:
  
  Here is the equivalent bit of the chat file:
  
  here is the same chat file snippet when you *hide* the decibel tier and the timestamps (which get hidden as bullet characters):
  
  

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• Pipeline from lena recorder to (lena-generated, old-format) chat file This is a set of step-by-step directions used in the Bergelson lab for the Seedlings project. NB some aspects of this will be changing as the lab shifts to the newer-better-improved [thanks Brian and Leonid of CHILDES!] lena2chat .cha format, in late july 2015] http://wiki.bcs.rochester.edu/Seedlings/Lena