Auditory Discrimination in Depth

Auditory Discrimination in Depth (ADD) was the name of the predecessor of The Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing Program for Reading, Spelling, and Speech (LiPS; Lindamood & Lindamood, 1998). It is designed to teach students

1. the kinesthetic, auditory, and visual features of the common English phonemes;
2. to use these features to monitor and represent sequences of sounds;
3. to learn self-monitoring skills.

All students begin with lessons on the specific mouth movements associated with each phoneme. Labels such as "lip popper," "tip tapper" and mouth-form pictures for each phoneme describe its articulation. The first set of these lessons is on 5 consonant pairs. Both "brothers" in a pair has same articulatory gestures but differed in voicing (e.g., /p/ and /b/ or /t/ and /d/). The next set of lessons are on vowels. Students distinguish vowel sounds and their respective mouth and tongue positions. These are represented on a "vowel circle" that categorizes mouth positions as smiling, open, or round.

In the next set of lessons, students represent sequences of phonemes with either mouth-form pictures or colored blocks to manipulate identity, number, and sequence of sounds in syllables.

Only when students gain proficiency at representing sequences of sound with objects are they taught to associate specific phonemes with specific letters. With these associations students spell CV, VC, and CVC nonsense words with letters and decode syllables by blending phonemes. Lessons commonly include spelling and decoding in chains in which a word changes one phoneme per link.

Chains go like this:

• Instructor has student represent two phonemes with colored blocks, mouth-form pictures, or letters.
• Instructor: What does that say?
• Student: /a/ /d/. /ad/.
• I: Good. And what would you change to make it say, /od/.
• S (sets a aside and puts o in its place): /o/ /d/. /od/.
• I: Good. Now change the d to an t. What does that say?
• S (after making the change):  /o/ /t/. /ot/.

Over time, these lessons cover all 44 English consonant and vowel phonemes.

ADD focuses on decoding and spelling phonemically regular words and non-words. The program includes teaching students to memorize the parts of real words that "don't play fair." It also includes sight word drills with common words. Finally, it teaches basic phonics rules and strategies for decoding multisyllable words.

About 95% of the instructional time in ADD is spent at the phoneme, letter, and word levels. The remainder is spent with decodable, connected text written for ADD.