An echoic is what occurs when verbal behavior has point-to-point correspondence with its preceding verbal stimulus (Skinner, 1957). In layman’s terms, it’s a verbal imitation of what comes immediately before it; an “echo” of someone else's words.

The ability to echo words is an important skill in early language acquisition and there are several behavior analytic strategies that use echoics to teach other types of verbal behaviors like manding, intraverbals and tacting!