WhisperPhone® Element

Grades K - 4. Help young children along the path to literacy with the WhisperPhone® Element. The WhisperPhone® uses an acoustic feedback tool that quickly transmits the sound of a child's voice to their ear. The WhisperPhone amplifies the child's voice directly to their ear, providing clear auditory feedback. The immediate auditory feedback encourages better enunciation and fluency, which are critical components of effective reading. This enables them to hear themselves reading and minimizes distracting noises so they can focus. This elevated focus will enable children to make significant strides toward literacy. The WhisperPhone provides a private and non-judgmental way for children to practice speaking and reading aloud, helping them become more comfortable with their voice and more willing to participate in classroom discussions and activities.

How WhisperPhone® helps:

Reading and Spelling

When students are learning to read, they must read aloud. One of the reasons this is true is because children must first be made aware of the individual sounds, or phonemes, in a word. Once they are aware of these phonemes, they begin to recognize that when these sounds are put together, they equal a word. By raising the learner's phonemic awareness, WhisperPhone® accelerates the learning process.

By raising phonemic awareness, WhisperPhone® enhances reading and spelling results:

• Situation: Improving reading results, reading fluency, reading comprehension, and taking vocabulary test.
• Activity: Wear while reading. Use during spelling tests.
• Expected Outcomes: Improved reading skills. Improved spelling skills.
• Why WhisperPhone® helps: Raises phonemic awareness.

By raising phonemic awareness, WhisperPhone® enhances reading and spelling results:

• Situation: Checking work aloud or wearing during any "learning aloud" activity.
• Activity: Sub-vocalizing concepts.
• Expected Outcomes: WhisperPhone® blocks distractions and helps students focus. It also encourages softer voices to create a quieter learning environment.
• Why WhisperPhone® helps: Provides multiple visual, auditory, motor inputs and blocks distractions by improving signal-to-noise ratio.

Editing and Writing

When children are learning to write, it is common for them to misspell words or even omit words. When wearing WhisperPhone® during a writing or editing activity, learners can, without disturbing others, say every word aloud to hear each sound in the word very clearly. Speaking each word aloud as they write it tends to have a positive effect in three areas. First, it slows the pace at which they write so they take the time to really focus on their work. Second, learners tend to omit fewer words in their initial copy writing. Third, because they sound out each word as they write it, spelling results tend to improve. These same benefits will likely be seen in editing phase of writing as well.

Special Needs

WhisperPhone® enhances therapy efforts with the following…

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

• Activity: Practice reading aloud
• Expected Outcomes: Stronger retention of and familiarity with sight words; improved reading comprehension
• Why WhisperPhone® helps: WhisperPhone® provides multiple visual, auditory, motor inputs and blocks distractions by improving signal-to-noise ratio.

Childhood Apraxia of Speech

• Activity: Repetition of sounds, syllables, words, sentences with varying rate, intensity, and duration; expressive reading.
• Expected Outcomes: Better articulation.
• Why WhisperPhone® helps: WhisperPhone® helps by simultaneously strengthening the signal, in conjunction with the Tactile Proprioceptive Kinesthetic (TPK) Loop, it strengthens the neural signal to build a stronger neural pathway. In other words, it becomes easier for the user to repeat the desired pronunciation in the same way in the future.

Auditory Discrimination

• Activity: Repeating a verbal description (e.g. "The chicks are on the table" versus "The chips are on the table") and then identifying the corresponding picture.
• Expected Outcomes: Improved ability to hear differences between similar sounding words.
• Why WhisperPhone® helps: WhisperPhone® helps by increasing the signal to noise ratio, it reduces background noise and highlights the difference between hard-to-hear contrasts between similar sounds.

Autism

• Activity: Role playing of socially acceptable behavior/naming pictures aloud.
• Expected Outcomes: Learner better able to modulate voice (i.e. rate, duration, intensity)
• Why WhisperPhone® helps: WhisperPhone® helps by simultaneously strengthening the signal, in conjunction with the Tactile Proprioceptive Kinesthetic (TPK) Loop; it strengthens the neural signal to build a stronger neural pathway. In other words, it becomes easier for the user to repeat the desired pronunciation in the same way in the future.

Dyslexia

• Activity: Practicing reading aloud.
• Expected Outcomes: Stronger retention/familiarity with sight words/comprehension.
• Why WhisperPhone® helps: WhisperPhone® helps by providing stronger auditory input and blocks distractions by improving signal-to-noise ratio. Through an improved signal-to-noise ratio, the learner can hear phonemes more clearly and self-monitor/self-correct more effectively.

Auditory Processing Disorder (with weakness in auditory decoding)

• Activity: Distinguishing between words with similar sounds (e.g., cake-Kate-take; nine-mine-mime) and/or completing rhymes.
• Expected Outcomes: Increased consistency in being able to read and produce the target words.
• Why WhisperPhone® helps: WhisperPhone® helps by increasing the signal to noise ratio, it reduces background noise and highlights the difference between hard-to-hear contrasts between similar sounds.

Aphasia

• Activity: Reading out loud, engaging in verbal problem solving tasks, picture description tasks.
• Expected Outcomes: Increased control of verbal expression secondary to increased detection of one's own errors.
• Why WhisperPhone® helps: WhisperPhone® helps by increasing signal to noise ratio; which increases attention to and focus on one's own verbal output resulting in improved detection of errors. Improved detection allows for quicker repair and self/correction and, thus, decreases dependency on prompts from others.

Non-Verbal or Limited Verbal Child

• Activity: Free play with toy animals, cars, planes, etc.
• Expected Outcomes: Increased sound play and improved imitation of non-speech sounds.
• Why WhisperPhone® helps: WhisperPhone® helps because it amplifies a child's own sound production and increases auditory feedback of the sounds, it reinforces sound production.

Selective Mutism

• Activity: Making sound effects while listening to a story that is read aloud or when playing.
• Expected Outcomes: Making more sounds in the presence of others.
• Why WhisperPhone® helps: Because it amplifies a child's own sound production and increases auditory feedback of the sounds, it reinforces sound production. The child may focus more on the enjoyment of his own sounds without focusing on the presence of another person.

Prosodic Defects

• Activity: Repeating syllables, words, sentence with varying rate, intensity, and duration; expressive reading.
• Expected Outcomes: User can match prosodic patterns of language they're learning. Users will have increased awareness of their own speech prosody and will be better able to produce varied intonation patterns to match a target pattern and to incorporate the patterns when reading.
• Why WhisperPhone® helps: WhisperPhone® helps by enhancing the auditory feedback loop by making users' speech more distinct to themselves and thus improves self monitoring and allows for better self correction.

Learning a New Language

Foreign language teachers and teachers with ELL students — WhisperPhone® provides assistance when learning the intricacies of a new language. It helps to develop or lighten accents for better pronunciation.

• Situation: Accent modification and learning a new language. WhisperPhone® is great for ELL students and foreign language classrooms.
• Activity: Repeat syllable, word, and sentence with varying rate, intensity, and duration. Also wear WhisperPhone® during expressive reading.
• Expected Outcomes: Learner more likely to match phonemes and prosodic patterns of language being learned.
• Why WhisperPhone® helps: Each language has its own unique set of phonemes and prosody. Through an improved signal-to-noise ratio, the learner can hear phonemes more clearly and self-monitor/self-correct more effectively. Since WhisperPhone® only requires a soft voice, users are often more likely to take risks in trying new pronunciations around their peers in a learning environment.

Music, Debate, Theater, Speech

Theater requires each actor to become a new character, which often means adjusting an accent or using one's voice to portray an emotion. WhisperPhone® helps actors to practice modulating their voices while also providing an excellent way to memorize their lines.

Debate and speech practice with WhisperPhone® helps the speakers to keep away from a monotone voice and learn ways to make their standpoint better understood through voice fluctuation. It also helps with memorization.