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About LENA

LENA is a national nonprofit based in Louisville, Colo. LENA is on a mission is to transform children’s futures through early talk technology and data-driven programs. Used by researchers, clinicians, community organizations, and early childhood education initiatives all over the world, LENA technology measures a child’s language environment and provides vital feedback to parents, other caregivers, and early childhood educators in programs dedicated to improving child outcomes.

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Leadership Team

Dr. Stephen M. Hannon is the President and CEO of LENA. He has steered LENA through its ambitious growth, leveraging a wealth of technical and leadership skills honed over a long career spanning multiple industries. His experience has provided the foundation for LENA’s unique technology to be paired with programmatic impact felt across early childhood.

Dr. Jill Gilkerson is the Chief Research and Evaluation Officer of LENA. She has been instrumental to just about every major initiative involving LENA. She manages a team of researchers responsible for collecting and analyzing the spontaneous speech data used for software development, the LENA normative scales, and a wide range of academic research studies.

Rocy Gomez O’Keefe is the Vice President of Growth at LENA. After numerous years working in K-18 education, she saw the importance of reaching children at an earlier age. Her passion to impact children earlier led to her transition into working with early childhood educators. After her first position in early childhood as the Vice President of Sales & Partnership Development at Teachstone, she joined LENA as the Vice President of Growth.

Katharine Correll is the Vice President of Impact at LENA. She has over a decade of experience working with nonprofits to meet strategic programmatic and financial goals. Before coming to LENA, she spent four years in K-12 supporting educators in non-instructional leadership development.

Dr. Sahar Bou-Ghazale is Vice President of Technology Innovation at LENA. With over 25 years of expertise in voice recognition, audio standards, and speech processing, Sahar has led technology roadmap development across global teams and guided products from inception to high-volume production. Having published over 20 publications and patents, Sahar passionately applies her expertise to help children’s language development.

Vince Swartout is Chief Information and Operations Officer at LENA. He played strategic and tactical roles building a nationwide data processing company, and helped the Dolan Company through its IPO. Along the way he developed proprietary process improvement and workflow modelling methods, became well versed in audit and information security, and saw first-hand how important it is to connect good people and good “IT.”

Quick Facts

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.

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, Italian, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Danish, Brazilian Portuguese, Vietnamese, and Swedish. A peer-reviewed paper published in 2023, "Everyday language input and production in 1,001 children from six continents," also included data from children exposed to dozens more languages, including Papiamento, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Sahaptin, Slovenian, Solomon-Islands Pidgin, Thai, Turkish, and Yoruba, to name a few.

LENA technology has powered more than 200 peer-reviewed studies. The full bibliography is available at LENA.org/research. News articles summarizing some notable papers include:

Conversational turns are simple back-and-forth alternations 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. Using LENA technology, researchers have linked conversational turns to brain structure, brain function, reading skills, IQ scores, social-emotional development, language development, executive functioning, and vocabulary skills, making conversational turns one of the strongest predictors of child outcomes.

All of LENA’s programs are designed with built-in efficacy measures. More details about program effectiveness are available at lena.org/effectiveness.

LENA Grow has been shown to be effective at improving child outcomes, including cognitive development, language development, social-emotional skills, and literacy skills. It has also been shown to be effective at improving outcomes for early childhood educators, including CLASS® scores, job satisfaction and self-efficacy, family engagement, and job retention.

LENA Start has been shown to be effective at improving language development, literacy skills, and kindergarten readiness.

Contact

To connect with a member of LENA's leadership team or a subject matter expert, or to request visual assets such as logos, photos, or videos, please contact:

Ivan Ross
Senior Marketing Manager
ivanross@lena.org

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