The Effects of an Auditory Matching iPad App on Three Preschoolers' Echoic and Listener Responses

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.