The Effects of an Auditory Matching iPad App on Three Preschoolers’ Echoic and Listener Responses
An iPad auditory matching game quickly sharpens both speech clarity and listener skills in preschoolers with disabilities.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Du and colleagues tested an iPad app called "Sounds the same."
Three preschoolers with disabilities played the game for a few minutes each day.
The app plays a sound. The child taps the picture that matches the sound.
The team tracked echoic clarity and listener skills before and after the game.
What they found
All three kids spoke the words more clearly after the game.
They also got better at picking the right picture when they heard a word.
The gains showed up quickly and stayed for the whole study.
How this fits with other research
Sun et al. (2024) ran the same idea but faster. Their toddlers hit mastery in fewer learn units, so the 2024 protocol now beats the 2017 one.
WMruzek et al. (2019) used tabletop match-to-sample plus echoic prompts and saw new tacts pop out. Du skipped the extra prompts yet still got echoic gains, showing the iPad game alone can work.
Tullis et al. (2021) added instructive feedback during group tact drills and created untrained intraverbals. Du’s simpler iPad set-up targeted echoics and listener skills instead, giving you two roads to emergent skills.
Why it matters
You can run this app during break time with almost no prep. Try it with preschoolers who mumble or lag on listener tasks. Track echoic clarity with a quick 5-trial probe before and after the game. If you need speed, switch to Sun et al.’s accelerated steps, but keep the iPad game in your toolbox for easy, fun practice.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
We investigated the effects of an auditory match-to-sample protocol on three preschoolers’ accurate echoics to 100 English words and advanced listener responses. The protocol was presented by using an iPad app Sounds the same: an app to target listening and speaking clearly. We used a combination of a multiple probe design (for echoic responses) and a delayed multiple probe design (for advanced listener literacy responses) with a time-lagged baseline across participants to test the effectiveness of the protocol. The three participants ranged from 4 to 5 years old and were all diagnosed as preschoolers with disabilities. They were taught to discriminate between positive and negative exemplars of progressively more difficult sounds, words, and phases by matching the sample stimulus to the matching exemplar. Our data show that the mastery of the intervention resulted in increases in the accuracy of the participants’ articulation of their echoics, as well as their advanced listener repertoires as measured by the responses to spoken directions in the presence of visual distractors.
Behavior Analysis in Practice, 2017 · doi:10.1007/s40617-017-0174-z