Frequently Asked Questions

General Questions

Yes. 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.

Visit Join Our Team to see open positions at LENA.

In addition to an excellent benefits package for full-time employees (including medical, dental, vision, life/disability, HSA/FSA, 401(k), and Paid Time Off) and a competitive salary, we offer:

High-performance, cloud-enabled office technology that supports remote work.
A commitment to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, identities, perspectives, and skills.
A mission-driven culture devoted to improving outcomes for young children and families.

LENA Programs

All of LENA's programs — LENA Grow, LENA Start, and LENA Home — are designed with built-in efficacy measures. Visit our Program Effectiveness page and our blog to see numerous case studies demonstrating the programs' effectiveness.

In the short term, LENA and its implementation partners create data reports that track such metrics as conversational turn counts, adult word counts, child vocalizations, CLASS^®scores, TS Gold^®scores, and ECI scores.

In the longer term, each organization's LENA program contributes not just to improved outcomes for individual children, parents, and teachers, but also to sophisticated research. Over time, that research translates into an even more effective, evolving program model.

We also conduct annual surveys to track parents', teachers', coaches', and organizational leaders' satisfaction with the programs.

Implementing a Program

LENA Research

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.

A conversational turn is a simple but powerful 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. Any speech-like, non-cry sound counts as a turn — from an infant's coos to a toddler's words (either real or made up). Conversational turns are LENA’s proxy for quality “serve and return” interactions.

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, according to the Harvard Center on the Developing Child. That means that these years offer a unique developmental opportunity.

Conversational turns are linked to brain structure, brain function, reading skills, IQ scores, socioemotional development, and executive function. Download LENA's latest report, Inside Early Talk, here.

LENA partner sites across the world are implementing our programs to help close opportunity gaps.

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. 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.

LENA Technology

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.

Researchers, clinicians, and interventionists have proved LENA technology's accuracy in a wide variety of applications. 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.

In short: any language.

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, Arabic, Hebrew, and Swedish. Researchers are working on validation studies in several other languages, including 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.

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