Date of Defense

4-4-2020

Date of Graduation

5-2021

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Kelly Kohler

Second Advisor

Richard Malott

Keywords

Echoic, Mand, Tact, Auditory Matching, & Listener Responding

Abstract

An echoic is a verbal operant which is controlled by a verbal discriminative stimulus and is characterized by the repetition of the verbal behavior of another speaker with point-to-point correspondence between the sound of the stimulus and the response (Skinner, 1957). These echoic responses are very important for children with developmental disorders because their language development is very unpredictable and may not appear at all, potentially causing difficulties in school and problems with social development (Reed, 2005). Teaching language acquisition skills can help offset these problems because it reinforces future echoic responses and helps develop advanced verbal operants such as mands and tacts (Du, Speckman, & Cole-Hatchard, 2017). Increasing future verbal behavior allows children to properly express their wants and needs. Previous research has shown that auditory matching protocols were effective in improving children’s listener responding and pronunciation (Du, Speckman, & Cole-Hatchard, 2017; Choi, Greer, & Keohane, 2015: Speckman-Collins, Park, & Greer, 2007). The goal of this current study was to evaluate the effects of an auditory match-to-sample procedure on the echoic repertoire of a 3-year-old boy diagnosed with a developmental delay. The participant was taught to differentiate between progressively more difficult sounds, words, and multiple word phrases. Progress in this skill was monitored using the Early Echoic Skills Assessment which was probed four times over the study. It was expected that this procedure would result in an acquisition of more correct echoic responses.

Access Setting

Honors Thesis-Open Access

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