Understanding Auditory Processing

 Referred to as those internal processes that a person uses to make sense out of auditory messages.  Has been described as “What we do with what we hear.”

 The term Auditory Processing Disorder is used instead of the term Central Auditory Processing Disorder

 Auditory processing is viewed as a series of steps beginning after a person hears or “receives” the auditory signal at the ear and proceeds from the auditory nerve through the central nervous system in the brain.

 At minimum, a hearing screening be performed at 15 dBHL for all frequencies from 250 to 8,000 Hz.  Hearing loss may or may not be a factor that must be considered in accounting for any auditory processing problems.

 Evaluation of this area looks at a child’s level of awareness of the presence 0f auditory stimuli.  Some children learn to “tune-out” meaningful sensory input, such as speech, especially those with early histories of sensory deprivation

 The process by which the individual take the entire signal and extracts the meaningful elements from that signal in order to comprehend the message.  Tests using distorted speech rapidly presented word identification, and words broken into pieces are samples of verbal stimuli that are used to look at auditory decoding abilities.  Non-verbal auditory decoding tasks may be presented using tones instead of speech

 Involves a person’s ability to focus attention to the relevant parts of auditory messages while filtering out irrelevant pieces of information  Testing sustained attention to relevant vs. irrelevant information, and dividing attention between two relevant messages is accomplished to evaluate auditory attention abilities.

 Looks at how well a listener demonstrates responses relating to getting information into the memory store and how well the person can retrieve it from memory

 How we take the pieces of messages we hear and put the pieces together to form unified wholes in order to comprehend what we have heard.  Because integration is highly related to comprehension, to test this factor, mere repetition of words or tonal patterns are the stimuli used.  Various aspects of integration are evaluated  Looking at putting pieces of a word or tonal pattern together to synthesize the whole word or pattern  Having 2 words presented simultaneously in order to determine how the system works when more than one part of a message is received at the same time  Requiring the listener to go between different working parts of the brain in order to put messages together

 Integrative processes are still developing even among elementary school aged children  Although, interventions can make a difference  Consider hearing 2 sentences spoken one in each ear.  Integration difficulties would be detected if the 2 sentences merged into one message.

 Tasks involving strings of verbal information requiring the listener to form patterns in proper, organized sequences are the stimuli used to evaluate this process.  If information bits are not well organized, it will be more difficult to integrate them for appropriate comprehension and understanding

 A child who has a difficulty in 1 area may be fine in the other 5 areas.  Some children may have combinations of the 6 areas.  The only way to know for sure is to have the clinical audiological exam