Twinkle Twinkle Little ________.

We are all familiar with this “fill-in-the-blank” method of encouraging participation from our children. Leave out a familiar or repetitive part of a rhyme or story and pause, waiting expectantly, for the child to fill in the blank. We often do it without even thinking about it because it is such a common way we interact with children- stories, songs, familiar phrases.

This strategy is called Auditory Closure. Auditory Closure is when a speaker begins a song, rhyme, or sentence and then stops talking in order to encourage the child to fill in a verbal response. (Fickenscher, S., & Gaffney, E. (2016). Auditory verbal strategies to build listening and spoken language skills. Retrieved from http://www.auditory-verbal-mentoring.com/contact/contact.php) *can also be retrieved from this website using the navigation at the top of the page*

Essentially, Auditory Closure refers to the ability of a listener to decode information that was not heard completely or was distorted in some way and to fill in the missing information (Ferre, 2006). We can use the context of a situation or the part of the message that was understood to determine what might go in the missing space. When we use this strategy with children, we capitalize on the redundancy of familiar language so that they are able to use context clues to fill in the blank expressively.

What we are looking for, long term, is that the child can use contextual information to fill in the blank, to gain more information, or to clarify information and understand the whole message in difficult listening situations such as background noise, speakers with regional dialects, quiet speakers or with someone who mumbles (Ferre, 2006).

There are benefits of this strategy for the adult as well. So much of the work in Auditory Verbal therapy and carry over at home is the adult talking. We are coached and taught to narrate everything, notice, everything, talk about everything. But sometimes we can get trapped in a constant flow of questions bombarding the child. By changing some questions into statements and allowing the child to comment, we give them a different language structure to participate with. For example, when looking at photos, “Who’s that?” becomes “I see__________”.

As always, when we use this strategy we must remain diagnostic in our choice of language levels we are using ourselves and expecting from the child. Make sure the rhyme or song being used is something familiar to the child. Auditory Closure is best utilized when the child has the ability to meet with success.

Click here to download the handout for Auditory Closure or use the navigation at the top to download the entire Auditory Verbal Strategies resource.