AUDITORY PROCESSING DISORDER

 

WHAT IS AN AUDITORY PROCESSING DISORDER?

 

Auditory processing has been described as “what we do with what we hear” (Katz, Stecker & Henderson, 1992).  The ears are the hearing receptors, taking in auditory information.  The brainstem then acts as a gateway for auditory and also visual and motor information making its way to the brain.  That information is then transferred to the different portions of the brain responsible for recognizing the prosody or tone of the message, decoding clearly what has been said, remembering the information in the correct order, and understanding language, all in a timely fashion.  If there are auditory deficits at the peripheral, brainstem, or cortical levels, the ability to process auditorily is hampered.   

 

Neuro-auditory evaluation therefore includes, but is not limited to peripheral testing (pure-tone audiometry, tympanometry, DPOAEs, speech reception thresholds, speech discrimination in quiet), brainstem testing (acoustic reflexes, ABR), and auditory processing testing (soft intensity speech, Speech-In-Noise, Compressed Speech, Auditory Fusion Test, Phonemic Synthesis, Pitch Pattern Sequence, Dichotic Digits, SSW, SCAN-C). 

 

The areas of auditory processing are:

• Auditory prosodics:  hearing the melody of speech; important skill for being able to determine a speaker’s intent by the tone of their voice
• Auditory decoding:  hearing clearly in degraded listening situations such as listening to soft speech, being far away from a speaker, and / or listening in noise 
• Phonemic synthesis:  blending sounds auditorily (e.g. /b/-/a/-/t/ = bat).  This is an important pre-requisite skill for learning to read by phonics
• Auditory integration:  moving auditory information efficiently from one brain hemisphere to the other (inter-hemispheric communication) and from the auditory to the language centers of the brain (intra-hemispheric communication); these are important skills for processing auditory information in a timely fashion so as to be able to follow multi-step directions and also for language processing, in general
• Auditory organization:  remembering auditory information in the correct order

 

Deficits in any of these areas can now be identified and frequently treated successfully through available and proven interventions.