The Establishment of Incidental Bidirectional Naming through Multiple Exemplar Instruction: a Systematic Replication.
Rotating listener-speaker MEI with echoics incidentally teaches untaught word-object relations in most preschoolers.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team worked with four preschoolers who had different diagnoses.
They used a listener-speaker game that kept switching roles.
Each turn added a quick echoic prompt so the child repeated the name.
The goal was to see if the kids would later name objects that were never directly taught.
What they found
Three of the four children started naming new objects without any extra teaching.
This untaught ability is called Inc-BiN, or incidental bidirectional naming.
The echoic boost inside the rotation seemed to make the difference.
How this fits with other research
Hewett et al. (2024) ran a similar rotation but looked for intraverbal answers instead of Inc-BiN.
Their first phase, tact-only, helped only one child; full MEI was needed for the rest.
The target study shows that adding echoics inside MEI can prevent that early failure.
Zhou et al. (2026) also saw untaught tacts and listener responses, but after a single Chinese-to-English intraverbal drill.
Their cross-language result widens the Inc-BiN idea beyond English-only word sets.
Tavassoli et al. (2012) had already shown that brief echoic history speeds later intraverbal learning.
The target paper puts that echoic history right inside the MEI loops, updating the older finding.
Why it matters
If you run listener-speaker rotations, slip in a quick echoic prompt each turn.
This tiny add may help more kids show Inc-BiN without extra phases.
Try it next time you want untaught naming to emerge and save teaching time.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Although many neurotypical children acquire untaught word-object relations incidentally from naturally occurring environmental experiences, many children with and without developmental disabilities require specific intervention. This study examined the effects of rotating listener (match and point) and speaker (tact and intraverbal-tact) responses with added echoics during multiple exemplar instruction (MEI) with training sets of stimuli on the acquisition of Incidental Bidirectional Naming (Inc-BiN). Listener-speaker MEI procedures reported in Hawkins et al. European Journal of Behavior Analysis, 10(2), 265-273, (2009) were replicated with procedural modification, new instructors, and new participants (four preschoolers with and without disabilities). The listener-speaker MEI with added echoics consisted of rotating across four response operants: match-with-echoics, point-with-echoics, tact, and intraverbal-tact responses. We measured the establishment of Inc-BiN through the number of the correct untaught listener (point) and untaught speaker (intraverbal-tact) responses for untaught stimuli during the listener-speaker MEI with added echoics. We found that listener-speaker MEI with added echoics was effective in establishing Inc-BiN for 3 of 4 participants.
The Analysis of verbal behavior, 2023 · doi:10.1037/h0100245