Frequently Asked Questions

“LENA” stands for Language ENvironment Analysis.

LENA is a national 501 (c)(3) nonprofit that was founded in 2004 by the late Terry Paul and his wife Judi, entrepreneurs who pioneered reading, math, and testing products used in 70,000 schools in the United States and more than 50 countries worldwide. Since then, LENA has become the industry standard for measuring early talk, used by communities all over the world in programs for families and teachers. In keeping with Terry and Judi’s original vision to level the playing field for children experiencing inequities, LENA’s programs utilize the technology to couple actional feedback with coaching to help adults increase the quality and quantity of talk with children. The unique measurement tool has also fueled research breakthroughs in neuroscience and child development, as scientists explore how interactive conversation with children changes their brains and is linked to long-term outcomes. As LENA continues to scale the reach and impact of its programs — reaching more than 10,000 children in 2019 on the way to even loftier goals — we dream of achieving Terry and Judi’s vision of ensuring every child enters kindergarten ready to succeed. Read more about LENA's history.

Organizations all over the world use LENA programs and tools to understand and enrich the language environments of children in their communities. Trusted community institutions like schools districts, libraries, hospitals, early learning coalitions, and Head Start programs are building early literacy skills, stronger families, and school readiness through collaborative partnerships with LENA. Explore our interactive map to learn more.

LENA's programming will support the unique goals of your center or your school. Whether it's through the lens of teacher professional development or increasing CLASS scores, we have found that our programming aligns seamlessly with your vision and priorities. Learn more about how different programs have seen results in their CLASS assessment scores using LENA.

LENA has been covered in everything from research papers from Harvard-MIT to the Netflix series "Babies." Visit our news page to read more about our news coverage in national and local media.

We are happy to help with any technical problems you have. Please contact our support staff by emailing support@lena.org, calling 303.441.9072, or by completing the form on our contact page.

LENA uses a small wearable device — often referred to as a “talk pedometer” — combined with cloud-based software to deliver detailed feedback that helps adults make proven, sustainable increases in interactive talk with children. Research shows that there’s significant variability in how much adults talk with children and tells us that those who talk the least tend to overestimate how much they talk the most. Adult talk levels vary significantly during the course of the day and from week to week. That’s where LENA comes in — our language-measurement technology is an objective tool to help parents and teachers understand, measure, and increase conversations with children.

LENA technology has been proven in use worldwide for close to a decade by researchers, clinicians, and interventionists. Its language statistics were validated in a large-scale study that established norms for adult words, conversational turns, and child vocalizations. Every aspect of LENA technology has been extensively tested and calibrated in use through thousands of recordings in multiple languages and widely documented in published research. Download the technical reports to read more details.

LENA takes data security and privacy very seriously. We have built and implemented a multitude of technologies and processes to protect your data – and we stand behind them. We are proud to be Type II SOC 2 compliant, which means that every year an outside group audits LENA to confirm that we have appropriate data and privacy protections in place and are using them correctly. In LENA Grow, LENA Start, and LENA Home, audio recordings are automatically deleted immediately after processing into data (number of words and turns, etc.). The device has no playback capability, and the software doesn’t recognize the meanings of words, so no one can ever tell what was said. LENA SP and LENA Pro are the only two versions of LENA that allow the option to retain audio. Each group provides its parents with its own consent form, and parents have the option to participate or not. To learn more, read a message from our CIO about LENA's data privacy practices or review our official privacy policy.

LENA devices are completely safe. They meet U.S. and international safety standards for electronics and toys. Unlike cell phones, they do not transmit. They use the same kind of low-power processors as hearing aids.

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.

Early talk is one of the most important factors shaping children’s brain development during the first few years of life. To understand why early talk matters, it’s helpful to understand what science tells us about child development during the earliest years: Brains are built from the ground up. Unlike other organs, the human brain is unfinished at birth, and must be built through interactions with adults. Research shows that back-and-forth interactions with adult caregivers are one of the most powerful tools to create a firm foundation of healthy brain architecture for children. During the first years of life, infant and toddler brains are forming more than 1 million neural connections every second, the Harvard Center on the Developing Child reports. That means that these years offer a unique developmental opportunity. Read more here, and download LENA's latest report, Inside Early Talk, here.

A conversational turn is a simple back and forth alternation between a child and an adult. LENA technology counts that a turn has occurred when an adult speaks and a child follows, or vice versa, with no more than five seconds in between. Conversational turns are LENA’s proxy for quality “serve and return” interactions. Learn more here.

For a complete listing of research studies that have used LENA technology, download the bibliographies of journal publications and LENA user research presentations. To see examples of how researchers have used LENA technology to advance the different areas of study, visit our research page to browse by subject area. Find out about the latest studies on language and brain development and read Q&As with expert researchers on the research section of the LENA blog.

LENA partner sites across the country are implementing the technology as part of programs focused on closing opportunity gaps by boosting early language. Aggregated results show that relative to where they started, children whose parents or teachers participated in LENA programs are experiencing more brain-building interactions, particularly those who started the programs experiencing the least amount of talk. Children whose parents participate in the LENA Start program are gaining nearly two months of developmental skill every month. Longer-term, a longitudinal evaluation from Huntsville City Schools in Alabama looked at the school readiness of 4-year-olds whose families had participated in LENA Start an average of 2.5 years prior, finding that the children demonstrated considerably higher early literacy scores than a matched control sample. By teaching caregivers about the importance of interactive talk and equipping them with practical strategies to increase conversations every day, our mission is to close the “early talk gap” for good. Learn more here.