Abstract
The Language ENvironment Analysis system (LENA) is a tool used for investigating the audio and language environment of families of young children. To date, its normative data is in American English (Gilkerson, & Richards, 2008) despite a number of studies testing the feasibility of this system to other languages (Aragon & Yoshinaga-Itano, 2012; Gilkerson et al. 2015; Da Prato, 2016; Ganek & Eriks-Brophy, 2017; Canault et al., 2016). The objective of the present study was to investigate the characteristics of the natural language environment of Brazilian Portuguese speaking environments of children with normal hearing (NH) (n=7). A comparative analysis was also conducted with a cohort of children with hearing impairment (HI) (n=7). The LENA system was used for collecting data. The number of child vocalizations and adult words correlated well with human counts. Increase in sample size would generate a stronger correlation between the automated and the human counts. The natural language environment of the two groups was similar. Significant gender diferences were observed regarding the number of words spoken near the children by the participating female caregivers in relation to male caregivers. Differences in language performance among children with HI was associated with the age of fitting of hearing technology.