Echoic Training and the Acquisition of Bidirectional Naming in Elementary Students

I conducted 2 studies to investigate the relationship between vocal verbal behavior, specifically, articulation and the production of echoics, and the presence of bidirectional Naming (BiN). In Study 1, I performed a correlational analysis using data collected on (1) responses to bidirectional Naming probes, (2) standard score son an articulation assessment, and (3) scaled scores on a sentence repetition assessment which functioned to measure echoic behavior at the sentence level for 46 early elementary students. The number of correct responses to unfamiliar stimuli using unfamiliar spoken and visual stimuli were measured for bidirectional Naming probes. Student performance on the Goldman-Fristoe Test of Articulation 3 served to measure the participants’ articulation of consonant and consonant cluster sounds in the English language. The Recalling Sentences subtest on the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals® – Fifth Edition was used to measure the accuracy of participants’ echoic behavior when repeating spoken sentences. Results using a Pearson’s correlation showed that there was no significant correlation between bidirectional Naming and participants’ articulation scores using the Goldman-Fristoe Test of Articulation 3, r = .037, p = .808. However, there was a significant and overall positive correlation between bidirectional Naming and participant scores from the Recalling Sentences subtest, r = .589, p < .001. Following the results of the correlations from Study I, I tested the effects of 2 echoic training interventions on the acquisition of bidirectional Naming in 8 early elementary students that were grouped into matched pairs to form 4 dyads in Experiment I. In each dyad, 1 participant underwent a "verbal echoic” intervention consisting of echoing sentences comprised of grammatically coherent English that had verbal function. The matched participant in the same dyad went through an “acoustic echoic” intervention that used the same words contained in the sentence echoed by the participant in the verbal echoic intervention but scrambled so that the sentence were syntactically and semantically incoherent and thus, lacked verbal function. Results showed that 5 out of the 8 participants have acquired bidirectional Naming following either echoic condition. More specifically, 4 participants acquired bidirectional Naming after the verbal echoic condition. One other participant acquired bidirectional Naming following the acoustic echoic condition. The implications of the differences in the effectiveness of the two intervention conditions are discussed with regard to the significance of acquiring bidirectional Naming.