Auditory Processing

If your child struggles to follow directions, has a hard time spelling words, struggles to decode words, or is having behavior issues, auditory processing skills might be weak.

Auditory processing refers to how the brain interprets and comprehends sound.

If your child has an auditory processing disorder, then it’s difficult for the brain to process auditory information, even though hearing abilities are normal.

Processing auditory information isn’t just about hearing. It’s about what the brain does with the auditory information it receives. Effective auditory processing involves many different sub-skills.

These sub-skills might include the ability to weed out unnecessary background noises, distinguish the difference between individual sounds, remember auditory stimuli, understand spoken language, and fill in missing auditory components that are heard.

In addition, we rely on these (and other) auditory processing skills to communicate with others. Communication is a basic human need, so this is why people with auditory processing disorders are often prone to temper problems, behavior issues, and social isolation.

Multi-Step Oral Directions Can Really Mess Things Up!

If you’ve ever given your child multi-step oral directions and a meltdown followed, your child might struggle with processing auditory information.

An example of multi-step directions would be to tell your child to go upstairs, get the yellow coat out of the closet, and hang it up downstairs. For a child with auditory processing problems, this will be a real problem!

No wonder meltdowns happen! But the real problems start when your child goes to school. Modern schools still rely on the lecture format to teach information.

If you stop and think about it, your child is bombarded with multi-step directions all day long with this teaching format. Children who have strong auditory processing skills do better with the lecture model than kids who struggle to process auditory information.

How the ADD/ADHD Crossover Affects Kids with Auditory Processing Disorders

Many auditory processing disorder symptoms mirror those of ADD/ADHD. (Attention Deficit Disorder/ Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder)

All too often, students with auditory processing disorders are misdiagnosed with ADD/ADHD and are placed on medications they don’t need.

The problem arises because some kids who have ADD or ADHD also have trouble with listening and understanding sounds. For example, they might not understand instructions in a noisy room or get confused when someone talks fast.

This can make school and following directions even harder for them. If the child has ADHD, it’s even worse, because holding still is difficult as well.

When a child has both ADHD and an auditory processing problem, it can be tricky to tell which one is causing the trouble. ADHD can make it hard to focus and pay attention, while auditory problems make it hard to listen and understand.

Together, this combination can make learning extra challenging. That’s why it’s important for teachers and parents to be patient and give clear, simple instructions to help these kids succeed.

The Good News About Auditory Processing Disorders

It’s despairing to have a child with weak auditory processing abilities. But here’s the good news:

Auditory processing skills are like any other skill – like riding a bike or roller skating – and they can be strengthened.

Learning and ability gaps can be filled in one micro-skill at a time. Students can be taught to “listen” if the right activities are used in the right order. After all, there is a hierarchy to learning!

At Bravo! Tutoring, we’ve found that it’s important to start all struggling learners with some foundational auditory skills, work to strengthen visual processing skills, then sharpen and hone more difficult auditory processing abilities.

The Ability to Hear and Understand Auditory Information is Quite Involved!

Did you know that we take in sound with our ears, but process auditory information in our brains?

Hearing is a process that involves more than simply acknowledging and registering sounds.

Hearing involves the ability to:

attend to and remember various sounds
locate the direction that sound comes from
repeat sounds in the order given
recall various sounds in a specific order
be aware of rhythmic patterns
isolate individual sounds from a variety of different sounds presented
distinguish assorted sounds from background noises
draw meaning from verbal stimuli
fuse sounds coming into two ears into one unified sound
identify a sound in the initial, middle, and ending position of a word

Symptoms of Auditory Processing Disorders and How they Affect Learning Success:

Have you ever heard someone talking but couldn’t quite understand what they said, even though you heard all the words?

Or, have you ever been talking on a cell phone with bad reception? You had to strain to understand what was being said on the other end.

Some kids feel like that a lot. Their ears work just fine, but their brain doesn’t always understand the sounds the right way. This can make it hard to follow directions or know what’s going on in class. This problem is called an auditory processing disorder, or APD (Auditory Processing Disorder).

Kids with APD might feel confused when people talk fast or when there’s a lot of noise in the background. It’s like their brain is working extra hard just to figure out what someone is saying. Sometimes they might ask “What?” a lot or need things repeated over and over again.

They might also get distracted easily or look like they’re not paying attention, even when they are trying their best.

APD can sometimes appear like other learning issues such as ADD/ADHD or dyslexia. That’s why it can be hard to figure out what’s really going on. But understanding how APD works is the first step to helping kids who have it.

Signs and Symptoms of An Auditory Processing Disorder

Let’s look at some of the signs and symptoms that might show a child has an auditory processing disorder.

Following is a list of auditory processing disorder symptoms:

not following verbal directions well
a tendency to rush through assignments
daydreaming or not paying attention in class
easily distracted
prone to temper tantrums
easily confused
difficulty with interpreting and understanding verbal information and cues
must look at your face to understand verbal directions or instruction
incessant talking or bothering other students in class
frustration with large group interactions
has melt downs in stores or other areas where there is a lot of background noise
has an existing diagnosis of ADD/ADHD
the teacher or another professional has suggested that the child may suffer from ADD/ADHD
behavior issues that are difficult to explain

What it’s Like to Have an Auditory Processing Disorder

If your child has an auditory processing disorder, it can be hard to understand what people are saying, even if hearing is normal.

When someone talks, the words might sound jumbled or unclear, like when a radio isn’t tuned properly. It’s not that your child isn’t listening—it’s that the brain has trouble making sense of the sounds.

Even worse, if your child suffers from an auditory processing disorder, a day at school, with the influx of auditory information, might seem like a lifetime. In addition, your child might be misdiagnosed, mistreated, and misunderstood.

In school, this can make it tough to follow directions or understand the teacher, especially when there’s a lot of noise in the classroom.

It might feel like everyone else understands things quickly, while your child needs more time to figure out what was said. Sometimes, it’s hard for your child to tell the difference between similar-sounding words, which can be frustrating and confusing.

Focusing abilities rely on auditory stimuli, which is sound or noise that can be perceived by the auditory system and elicit a response. As a matter of fact, auditory stimuli place the most significant demands on attention and focusing, since they are temporally located in the brain.

Students who are diagnosed with ADD/ADHD often show huge improvement in focusing and concentration once auditory training skills are received and strengthened.

Mastering Auditory Processing Skills Doesn’t Have to be Hard!

Even though it can be challenging, there are ways to help kids master auditory skills.

There are numerous auditory processing skills like auditory synthesis, auditory closure, auditory discrimination, and auditory memory that can step by step enhanced to fill in gaps.

If you suspect your child has an auditory processing disorder, don’t despair. There’s so much that can be done to help kids who struggle to process auditory information.

Reading abilities also improve once the student is able to correctly process the auditory stimuli necessary for hearing sounds and sound segments, some of the necessary components for reading, fluency, and comprehension success.

The Bravo! Reading Program uses these units of sound along with movement to set in important auditory components necessary for efficient reading decoding skills.

People with auditory processing disorder are just as smart as anyone else—they just learn and understand things differently. With support and patience, they can do great things!

Filtering Out Distractions Can be Hard for Kids with Auditory Issues

Some children lack an adequate auditory “filter” which enables them to tune out background noises that aren’t important.

These kids might hear another student’s pencil as it moves across a page, or they might hear the whirring of a computer in the background of a classroom.

The buzzing of fluorescent lights can set them into a tailspin, or even the gentle whooshing of ceiling fans or the steady sound of traffic can cause discomfort.

After time, any of these seemingly innocuous noises can send a child with an auditory processing disorder into a tailspin.

Kids with auditory processing issues can be taught to filter out noises. Its not an easy, overnight process, but with the right exercises and time, your child doesn’t have to be distracted by these noises.

The Auditory Channel is Important for Learning

The Auditory Channel is crucial to learning, especially in the early stages of childhood development.

The auditory channel is the pathway through which sound information is processed and transmitted.

This channel encompasses both the physical structures of the ear (such as the ear canal and eardrum) and the neural pathways that carry auditory information to the brain for interpretation.

In essence, the auditory channel is how your child hears and understand sounds, including speech, music, and other auditory cues. If something goes wrong with processing information in an auditory channel during your child’s development, then there will be a gap in this part of the learning foundation until proper intervention is received.

Ear infections, high fevers, bumps on the head, allergies, and a host of other problems can occur while the brain is still forming neural pathways, and because of this, the information that is received in an auditory fashion is taken in and interpreted incorrectly.

If your child fails to form auditory information, then hearing the ending of sounds of words or may be difficult. Or perhaps your child won’t understand and correctly use vowel sounds. In addition, your child might lack the background noise filter or mispronounce words.

Struggling with Social Cues

Struggling with social cues is another problem that happens if improper auditory channel formation development takes place.

Tempers flare, because the child with this processing issue honestly thinks the rest of the world “hears” incorrectly.

Children with this problem have “heard” and processed information in a certain way their entire lives, so they can’t fathom processing it any other way.

If this sounds like your child, let Bravo! Tutoring use important brain integration activities to help prime the brain for proper auditory processing. From there, micro auditory processing skills are taught. It’s a win-win combination that’s helped struggling learners succeed for over twenty-three years!

The Social Impact of Poor Auditory Processing Skills

Often, children with auditory processing disorders have social problems. Many things can cause this. For starters, kids with APD struggle to relate to what their peers are saying.

They are often a step behind their peers, and know it. This is a bad start no matter what!

In addition, child with APD often learn to act goofy or do “naughty” things to get the attention off their academic or communication failures. These kids would rather have almost suffer anything over someone thinking they are dumb or inadequate.

Following rules of a game can be hard because there are so many the fact that they don’t understand what to do, how to talk to a peer, how to follow basic rules of a game.

They will often mispronounce words, like saying “ephalant” for elephant or “mazagine” for magazine. They might say “sink” for think or be unable to say a letter sound completely, like their “r” or “l” sound.

Because of this, they are often bullied, made fun of, or made to think that they are dumb. Sometimes they will become argumentative, because they heard something in a particular way, and they will “die on a hill” proving that point. That is the way they heard it, and they think everyone else is wrong because they are saying it differently.

If they are made to feel dumb, they will make up for it with boasting, lying (or what appears to be lying – in their minds these things happened), throwing tantrums, retreating, or just shutting down.

Auditory Processing Subsets that Affect Learning

Auditory discrimination is the ability to recognize differences in phonemes (distinct units of sounds). This includes identifying words and sounds that are similar and those which are different.

Students who struggle in this area may only hear beginnings, endings, or middle sounds of words or hear sounds and words incorrectly.

This affects not only academic achievement, but human relationships as well.

It is indeed difficult to read, spell, or write words if you cannot hear the sounds correctly or differentiate between different sounds.

Auditory Processing Skills that Affect Learning Success:

Auditory Memory:

Auditory memory is the ability to store and recall information which was given orally. An individual who suffers with this difficulty will not understand directions that are given, usually multi-step directions. It is as if the words flow right through their ears without sticking.

Oral information isn’t able to be recalled, and this makes studying for tests quite difficult, because these students can’t recall what the teacher said. Or they are famous for remembering a different version of what the teacher said or modeled.

Auditory Sequencing:

This is the ability to remember and reconstruct the order of items in a list or the order of sounds in a word or syllable. An example of a mistake made by a student who struggles in this area would be saying or writing “ephelant” for elephant.

Auditory Blending:

This is the process of putting together phonemes to form words. For example, the individual phonemes “c”, “a”, and “t” are blended to form the word “cat”. Phonemic awareness and blending falls into this auditory skill. Dyslexic students struggle with auditory blending because they cannot visually see or perceive the letters or hear the differences between the sounds.

Auditory Closure:

Auditory closure is the ability to fill in parts of words that were omitted in an auditory manner. This usually occurs in an automatic fashion and aids in comprehension. Auditory closure is important for learning, because students need to close up or fill in the unusual or missing parts of unfamiliar, misheard, or “strange” word(s) to which we are listening.

Auditory Figure Ground:

Auditory figure ground involves the ability to identify the primary auditory signal from background and competing noise.

This skill is the ability to identify the primary auditory signal from background and competing noises. It is crucial for students to succeed in a classroom environment where there are often background noises that they must tune out in order to concentrate on the teacher’s directions. Students must also be able to tune out other background noises such as airplanes or computers in order to function well in life.

Auditory Analysis

Auditory analysis is the ability to recognize phonemes or morphemes that are embedded in words. This skill is needed to distinguish verb tense, for example, saying leaped instead of leaps and other markers that may be masked, lost, or imitated background noises.

Sequential Auditory Memory:

This is the ability to recall and remember auditory information in the order given. At Bravo! Tutoring, we take it a step further and have students not only remember auditory stimuli and present it in the order given, but we have them also remember how it is given and then repeat it in a backward combination. This contributes to the student’s ability to use his working memory later on.

Sequential auditory memory is important for reading skills, as the student must be able to remember and use the sounds of words, words in sentences, and the meaning of sentences in paragraphs. It is also a crucial spelling and writing skill, as the student must be able to not only recall the letter of the spelling word, but the sound and order as well.

For math, this skill is important for a variety of reasons, starting with basic math facts memorization and moving on to recalling, using, and applying difficult formulas. Too often, this skill is overlooked in programs that claim they are addressing a student’s auditory processing skills.

Following Directions:

Okay, so this skill is so broad that I almost left it out, but it is one of the most important skills of all of the auditory skills we need for academic achievement. A student sitting in a classroom, or even in a preschool or kindergarten class, must follow directions all day long, as that is part of how the student survives and achieves academic success in a classroom. Even the home-schooled student must be able to follow oral directions.

We give the student a visual sheet and have him perform certain activities on that sheet by giving oral directions. We start out easy, then continuously make these exercises more difficult.

By learning to follow directions, the student can transfer this to the classroom and then understand a verbal lesson that is given.

Mental Math:

Did you know that mental math is actually an auditory skill? That is because the student must “hear” the problem in his brain first, before he can solve the problem. We make sure students can perform mental math by teaching it along with a physical activity. By jumping rope, hopping on a trampoline, bouncing a ball, performing cross crawls, or a host of other activities, the student is soon capable of performing mental math. This helps the student with dyscalculia as well as the student who struggles with math.

Analogies:

Once again, even though analogies are a common skill, often seen on tests, this skill is auditory in nature. The problem is that students are rarely taught how to reason out the comparisons that present themselves in analogies. We start with a visual, pictures of different objects and how they may relate or how they might be opposite in nature, or a different combination.

Once the student can easily figure out analogies that coincide with a visual target, then we can move on to simple comparison analogies with words only. Just like before, when this is easily accomplished and tested by the student, then we can move on to traditional analogies.

Like everything in the Bravo! Learning System, we break down the bigger academic component, add as many multi-sensory components as possible, and then we can move on to traditional analogies.

Like everything in the Bravo! Learning System, we break down the bigger academic component, add as many multi-sensory components as possible, and then slowly increase the demand.

Working with a Child with Auditory Processing Issues:

Get down to the child’s level when speaking to him.
Give the student your full attention.
Maintain eye contact.
Speak slowly and clearly.
Listen patiently without correcting.
Give her plenty of time to finish thoughts.
Don’t give him the words you think he is going to say because you are in a hurry or because of impatience.
Model good listening skills.
Break down oral directions into little chunks or pieces.
Try several different ways of giving directions. If one manner doesn’t work, then rephrase it.
Provide a quiet homework spot where academics can be done without distractions from siblings, television, video games, etc.
Keep loud and obnoxious noises to a minimum until proper interventions are put into place.
Allow the child to look at your lips while you speak. Many of these kids teach themselves to lip read without even knowing it.
Make sure the student is in a classroom with a small number of students or consider home schooling.
Set up a routine so that the student knows what to expect; be sure to go over any schedule changes ahead of time.
Don’t tolerate rude or disrespectful behavior, even though you know that it is due to an auditory processing problem. (see behavior problems)
Set up a positive behavior system if possible.
Give praise when it is due and be specific about it.
Provide as many visuals as possible.
If the student has social problems, enroll in a social skills group, or practice social skills. training at home. There are many resources available for social skills.