Have you looked closely at our logo lately?

If you have, you might’ve noticed a change.

We’ve simplified our name from LENA Research Foundation to just LENA. We’re also adopting the tagline “Building brains through early talk.”

This change reflects who we are and the work we’re doing to support parents, educators, and researchers in improving the language environments of children worldwide.

We’re proud to be the industry standard for measuring early talk environments, and the only validated measure of conversational turns. In fact, LENA devices were just used in a new study from Harvard and MIT that established a link between conversational turns and brain growth for the first time.

But research isn’t all we do. We’re also reaching parents through LENA Start — which tripled its reach last year — and educators through LENA Grow, which has rapidly expanded into 50 child care centers and continues to blossom. Our LENA Home program is providing objective data on early talk to parents during home visits, and LENA SP is serving as a practical tool for families with children who are a deaf and hard of hearing and research teams globally.

Building brains through early talk encapsulates all the initiatives that fall under the LENA umbrella, from ground-breaking research to high-quality interventions. Here are just a few examples:

• We’re building brains by…supporting parents like Lily Ellison, who learned about the importance of shared reading through LENA Start, and educator Vera Dunson, who discovered that increasing interactive talk can lead to stunning results in the children she teaches.

• We’re building brains by…supporting partners like Teaching Strategies®, who recently completed a pilot with LENA Grow that exposed children to an average of 1,100 more words and 59 conversational turns by the end of the program.

• We’re building brains by…providing objective feedback on the early talk environment for home visitors like Jennifer Calderon to use to as a teaching tool with parents.

So what do you say — isn’t it about time we were on a first-name basis?

LENA Team

The LENA Team is a dedicated group of professionals who are passionate about increasing awareness of the importance of early interactive talk. We are statisticians, speech-language pathologists, curriculum specialists, engineers, and linguists.