What is Auditory Processing?
Auditory Processing, like visual processing, can be difficult to diagnose. In fact, auditory processing most often goes hand in hand with visual processing disorder because they are both neurological disorders and the problems actually overlap in the areas of memory, discrimination, attention, and language. Most often, these disorders are treated simultaneously or if a child has one of the disorders but not the other he/she is treated with the same strategies that one might use for both.
Note that children with APD usually have normal hearing ability. However, they experience an inability to process verbal information and have a processing failure and do not process what is being said to them. Although they may be able to repeat back to you they may not understand anything you said to them.
What is Auditory Processing?
Simply put, Auditory Processing Disorder is the in ability to correctly process or interpret auditory information. Children with APD often do not recognize subtle differences between words, sounds, are unable to filter in noisy environments, are able to only concentrate on one auditory input at a time, and can be easily overstimulated or confused by many sounds because they don’t know what to focus on.
Symptoms:
* Have trouble paying attention to and remembering information presented orally
* Have problems carrying out multistep directions
* Have poor listening skills
* Need more time to process information
* Have low academic performance
* Have behavior problems
* Have language difficulty (e.g., they confuse syllable sequences and have problems developing vocabulary and understanding language)
* Have difficulty with reading, comprehension, spelling, and vocabulary
Causes of Auditory Processing Disorder:
Although the causes are not known it is known that APD is neurological. Some possible speculations for APD are head trauma, lead poisoning, and chronic ear infections. It can also be inherited or genetic
Common Areas of Difficulty:
Phonological Awareness: Inability to recognize or isolate individual sounds in a word, recognize similarities between words, or identify syllables in words.
Auditory Discrimination: Inviability to recognize different sounds and identify words that are different from each other. ie: bed is different than head but they sound the same.
Auditory Memory: Inability to follow verbal instructions. AJ has trouble with 1-2 step instructions unless he is also given visual cues.
Auditory Sequencing: Inability to store or reconstruct the order of things like elephant and ephelant. Can also be related to This, then This when verbally sequencing.
Auditory Blending: The process of blending sounds to form words. Children with APD will have great difficulty with this and may often just memorize the words.
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