The Effects of Echoic Training on the Emergence of Naming in a Second Language by Monolingual English-Speaking Preschool Children

I conducted two experiments to investigate the emergence of Naming in a second language by monolingual English-speaking preschool children who demonstrated Naming in English with non-contrived visual stimuli. In Experiment I, I tested for the presence of full echoic responses in Chinese with 32 monolingual English-speaking children. The participants were randomly assigned into two groups. Group I received echoic probes in Chinese phonemes with English approximations, while Group II received echoic probes in distinctive Chinese phonemes. Participants in both groups were probed for their echoic responses in English. Results showed that Group I outperformed Group II in the numbers of correct echoic responses in Chinese phonemes, suggesting that the numbers of correct echoic responses in Chinese were affected by the distinctiveness of the phonemes as well as participants' echoic responses in English. In Experiment II, I tested the effects of echoic training on the acquisition of Naming in Chinese with contrived and non-contrived visual stimuli by eight monolingual English-speaking preschool children. A multiple probe design was implemented for experimental control. I conducted naming probes in English with contrived and non-contrived visual stimuli, as well as naming probes in Chinese with contrived and non-contrived visual stimuli with all participants. Six out of eight participants received echoic training, while the other two participants went through repeated probes due to a lack of stable responding. The intervention consisted of the experimenter teaching the participants to echo Chinese consonant-vowel combinations that shared the same phonemes with the probes sets but with different consonant-vowel combinations. The participants were taught to say the target consonant-vowel combinations independently without an echoic model with 100% accuracy across three sessions during delayed probes in order to master a training set. Prior to the intervention, all participants demonstrated naming in English with non-contrived stimuli, but none of the participants demonstrated naming in English with contrived stimuli, or in Chinese with contrived or non-contrived stimuli. The results from post-intervention probes showed that echoic training was functionally related to the emergence of naming in Chinese with non-contrived stimuli for six participants, as well as naming in Chinese with contrived stimuli for five out of six participants.