Mastery of Echoics in Chinese Establishes Bidirectional Naming in Chinese for Preschoolers with Naming in English
Perfect echoics in a new language can unlock full bidirectional naming without extra training.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Cao et al. (2018) worked with English-speaking preschoolers who had no Chinese. They gave echoic training on Chinese sounds only. The kids repeated words like 'māo' until each sound was perfect.
Researchers then checked if the children could name pictures in Chinese without being taught. They used a multiple-baseline design across word sets.
What they found
After echoic mastery, every child could look at a picture and say the Chinese name. They also pointed to the correct picture when they heard the Chinese word.
In short, accurate echoics alone created bidirectional naming in the new language.
How this fits with other research
Cameron et al. (1996) predicted this result. Their theory said echoic training builds the bidirectional name relation that powers all symbolic behavior. Cao et al. (2018) supply the first clear preschool test of that claim.
Peters et al. (2013) also played with echoics. They showed stimulus order can boost echoic frequency during pairing, but order did not matter for emergent tact control. Cao’s team went further: they removed pairing altogether and still got emergent naming.
Hill et al. (2020) and Langton et al. (2020) used different methods—equivalence-based and matrix training—to create emergent piano skills. Cao’s echoic-only route shows emergent learning can start from pure vocal imitation without extra stimulus sets.
Why it matters
If you run verbal behavior programs, start new language units with crisp echoic drills. Once the child pronounces the foreign words correctly, test for untrained listener and speaker responses—you may not need separate picture-word pairing trials. This single step can save hours of teaching time and quickly expand a bilingual vocabulary.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The onset of the verbal behavior developmental cusp of bidirectional naming (BiN) in a second language makes it possible for monolingual English-speaking children to learn names of things in a second language incidentally. We conducted 2 experiments to identify why monolingual English-speaking children cannot demonstrate BiN in another language when they demonstrated BiN in their native language. In Experiment I, using a group design (n = 32 preschoolers), we identified Chinese speech sounds that monolingual English-speaking children with BiN in English for familiar stimuli could not echo. In Experiment II, using a multiple-probe design, we investigated if mastery of echoics with the speech sounds identified in Experiment I would result in BiN in Chinese with 6 participants from Experiment I. The dependent variable was untaught responses to the probe stimuli presented following the naming experience based on the echoic stimuli from Experiment I. The results showed that echoic training was functionally related to the establishment of BiN in the second language. It appeared that the emission of accurate echoics might be the key to second-language BiN and that emergent correspondence between producing and hearing that occurs with the mastery of the echoic responding may be the source of reinforcement.
The Analysis of Verbal Behavior, 2018 · doi:10.1007/s40616-018-0106-1