How do you feel when instructions such as these are given to your child, for example, “Do your homework and cleanup your room before you go outside and play.  I hope you remembered to eat your breakfast?” and nothing gets done.  What about the reports from school saying that your child is misbehaving and not following directions.  Or the low grades on exams when you know your child knew the material the night before.  Consider the times when you were going over homework with your child and it seems you are saying the same thing over and over and they don’t seem to get it.   You may, as parents, get confused about reports from school and what you see at home.  Your child seems to want to do the right thing…but they don’t.  They get really upset with themselves and end up with low self-esteem or they act out; other times they have difficulty with other children or can’t seem to learn to read and you don’t know what is going on or how to help them   

Sometimes the answer may be due to an auditory processing difficulty.  Their hearing may have tested normal, but they are having difficulties processing what they are hearing.  There are many different aspects to auditory processing.  A child (or adult) can have deficits in one or several of the many areas that encompass facets of the auditory processing categories.  They do not necessarily have difficulty in all areas.  As a matter of fact, they can be superior in some aspects of auditory processing and extremely deficient in others.   Difficulty with auditory discrimination areas such as interpreting words such as “wish” and “witch” as being the same word can be confusing to the listener or the speaker. Phonological judgment, such as being able to identify sounds in different positions of a word or making a sound/symbol relationship can be essential in reading and writing as well as speaking. Still other areas of processing information we hear can effect following directions, sequencing, logic and memory (both immediate and short term).  Auditory reception is the ability to process and understand information provided via the auditory channel.  What our ear hears is being misinterpreted by our brain. “WH” questions can be confused.  There can be difficulty in answering yes /no questions for example when auditory reception is impaired.  The ability to gain meaning from the question is inadequate.  This in turn causes difficulty in language expression as well as comprehension. 

There are many aspects of language and communication as well as social interaction that can be traced back to how we processed or “heard” the information that was given.   Terrie James Bellis PhD. has written a book entitled “When the Brain Can’t Hear”,  it is an excellent resource for beginning to understand this vast and complicated area of auditory processing. 

The most important step to figuring out whether an auditory processing difficulty is present is by ruling out an organic hearing loss.    An audiologist is the professional that measures hearing levels through pure tone and speech audiometric testing as well as middle ear pressure.  An ear-nose-throat physician is another important professional to visit to make sure there is no fluid in the ear, an absence of wax build up or an infection or medical reason influencing the ear and the sense of hearing. When organic hearing loss and a medical diagnosis are not causing your child’s “listening” difficulties you begin assessment procedures specifically for auditory processing.  An audiologist can be an excellent resource for calibrated and objective testing.  A speech language pathologist is another professional that would do testing that correlates listening with language comprehension and expression and use this information for intervention.  Neuropychologists are also very effective in identifying these types of learning difficulties.  If the processing of what is heard is found to be inadequate, a speech language pathologist can provide therapy.    Intervention can be provided to aid these specific areas of weakness to promote better functioning levels. This improvement should be obvious to the teachers, therapist, parents and the child fairly soon.  Measurements can be provided with follow up testing to see the numerical gains made.

The way we interact with our environment is vital to our performance, our socialization skills, and our self-esteem.  It is important to identify the problem so we can provide support.