AUDITORY PROCESSING DISORDER (APD)

Autistic Spectrum Disorder
Social Language Impairments
(Pragmatic Language Impairment – PLI)
Learning Difficulty/Disability (LD)
Hearing Impairment
Auditory Processing Disorder (APD)
Phonological disorders
Articulation disorder

As the name states Auditory Processing Disorder (APD) is a difficulty with processing and interpreting the auditory information taken in from our environment. It does not come from a hearing impairment, since it has to do with processing of heard information rather than the actual physical hearing of sound information.

Children with APD have difficulties with:

  • hearing speech in a noisy environment
  • localising sound
  • remembering information or given instructions
  • making up and keeping rhythm
  • discriminating and recognising sounds
  • sequencing auditory information (from sequencing sounds to produce words, to retrieving automatic sequences  such as recitation of numbers)
  • with phonological awareness tasks.
  • processing temporal patterns (such as, temporal integration, temporal discrimination, temporal ordering, and temporal masking)
  • processing information at adequate speed
  • integrating speech with movement (e.g.,walking and talking

So, if you find yourself wondering why does my child:

  • have difficulty paying attention  have difficulty following oral instructions
  • Battle to carry out multistep commands
  • Have trouble with listening skills
  • Have poor performance at school
  • Have bhv problems
  • Have difficulty with reading, comprehension, spelling and vocabulary

Your child may be presenting with an auditory processing disorder.

Speech therapy for children with APD is tailored around targeting specific difficulties such as auditory memory tasks which improve the child’s ability to hear a multistep command, remember it and carry it out, language tasks such as enhancing vocabulary knowledge, skills to aid with spelling and reading difficulties and auditory discrimination tasks (hearing differences between sounds).