Caregivers can use LENA technology in any language to see changes over time. LENA has primarily been used in English and Spanish, and studies have been published to validate adult word counts in English, Spanish, European French, the Shanghai dialect of Mandarin Chinese, Korean, and Swedish. Researchers are working on validation studies in several other languages, including Hebrew, Norwegian, Danish, Vietnamese, and Brazilian Portuguese. For other languages, the word count may be less accurate, but we would expect that the error rate would be consistent, so users can still confidently measure change over time and see times of high talk and turns.
This is not a comprehensive list, so please reach out to info@lena.org if you have questions about a language not listed above. Please visit https://www.lena.org/research/ for a bibliography of language validation studies.