CAST–Contrasts for Auditory and Speech Training

An early but critical skill in the auditory hierarchy is for children to be able to differentiate between different speech sounds. I remember many hours of working on DASL skills  with students, wishing I had ready-made and attractive cards for each of the contrasting sound pairs. What I really love about CAST is that it has a pretest so you can gather data on your student’s present level of performance and also identify where you need to start developing auditory skills . If you have never worked before with young students new to their hearing aids or cochlear implants on developing their auditory skills, the CAST is an excellent program that will help you, and your students, learn more about developing the hierarchy of auditory skills. For veterans, it is a welcome addition with attractive cards and a very well-developed methodology. Karen Anderson, Director.

Outcome:  Identify speech sounds and words based on acoustic characteristics AGES 3-12, PreK-7 (depends on language ability)

Components: 30-page manual; 150 3¾” x 8½” double-sided, coated picture cards; 9 divider cards; pretest; sturdy box

This program is to develop auditory skills for children with:

• cochlear implants
• hearing loss and hearing aids
• weakness in auditory discrimination
• disorders of speech sound awareness

CAST uses a bottom-up approach in which parts of the speech signal (e.g., suprasegmental characteristics and vowel and consonant features) are highlighted and contrasted to improve speech recognition ability. Pairs of stimuli with grossly different acoustic characteristics are introduced and practiced before those with finer acoustic distinctions.

The 30-page manual includes:

• CAST pretest
• guidelines and procedures
• training hierarchy
• cueing techniques
• criterion levels

There are 150 double-sided picture/stimulus cards. The front and back of each card has two illustrations that contrast the target acoustic characteristics. There are 28 pretest cards to help determine the need for auditory training and the level at which to begin listening practice. 

 The remaining cards contrast:

• presence and absence of speech
• long versus short speech sound productions
• continuous versus interrupted speech sound productions
• words with one, two, and three syllables
• phonemically dissimilar words (e.g., bowl/cup, camel/giraffe)
• wide and narrow vowel minimal pair words (e.g., heat/hat, top/tap)
• consonant manner minimal pair words (e.g., kick/chick, saw/jaw)
• consonant voicing minimal pair words (e.g., sip/zip, fan/van)
•  consonant place minimal pair words (e.g., feet/seat, gate/date)