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Auditory Processing Impacts Many Aspects of Life
Auditory processing disorder (APD) is an umbrella term that describes many different auditory processing problems and difficulties synthesizing auditory information. While most children with learning difficulties are not formally diagnosed with APD because it impacts language mastery, which is the key to learning, undiagnosed auditory processing delays—mild or otherwise—are much more common than you might think.
Auditory processing is not about physical hearing. However, many children with hearing problems tend to have delayed auditory processing skills because they have fewer opportunities to listen and process.
Most parents suspect auditory processing disorder in children only if speech does not develop as expected. If children are not processing words clearly, they will be reluctant to speak words out loud. This speech delay applies to more severe cases only. Many children with auditory processing problems do not have speech issues. Either way, most of the time, while the speech delays go away, the auditory processing difficulty remains. Check out auditory processing disorder symptoms.
Many Children Have Some Degree of Auditory Processing Difficulty
Mastering language at natural language speed is one of the fastest and most challenging cognitive tasks the brain can perform.
Not surprisingly, many children struggle early on with reading. By age 5 or 6, they have not developed the processing skills needed to decipher every sound in every word. This includes around 40% of 6-year-old children.
Arguably, most have at least a mild form of auditory processing disorder that is impacting their ability to learn to read.
Left untreated, auditory processing disorder can impact all aspects of a child’s life. While there are commonly recognized difficulties associated with APD — namely following directions and handling background noise — there are several consequences of auditory processing disorder for a child around two core themes:
- Sounds come too fast. The world travels at one speed- natural language speed, 40 sounds per second, but APD children process at another at a lower speed, meaning they spend their days a little off balance, trying to catch up or keep up. Much is missed. It’s exhausting and, in the end, more often than not, unproductive – each day means more lost ground.
- Language is muddy. As author Karen J. Foli first described it, listening to sound through water is like listening to water. This has consequences for the APD child: Listening is always exhausting, and picking out sounds inside words, as required for reading, is challenging indeed. This is sometimes called a language processing disorder.
Here is a list of some of the other, often surprising, ways these two aspects of auditory processing problems —the world coming too quickly and muddy language—impact a child’s day-to-day life.
#1. Auditory Processing Disorder & Making Friends
One of the less understood impacts of auditory processing disorder in children is how it undermines social interaction. APD makes it hard for children to keep up with conversations. By the time they hear and process what someone says on the playground, others will have responded, and the conversation will have moved on.
This leads to a tendency not to participate. It may be easier to hover around quietly or, due to the frustrations of not keeping up, just prefer one’s own company. Making friends is just too hard. This can become a vicious cycle, as the lack of social interaction leads to less-than-normal conversation and language stimulation, the main ways auditory processing skills gradually improve.
#2. Auditory Processing Disorder & Classroom Humiliation
While the difficulties APD children have with background sounds in typically noisy classrooms are well known, the humiliations and disappointments they experience daily are less understood. During the school day, a child is called on to participate somehow. Generally, this participation is preceded by a question or request requiring an immediate response.
This is no easy feat for children with auditory processing problems. They need a few seconds to process the question or request (while the rest of the class looks on and waits), and then they need to decide on a response.
If your APD child is having a hard time going to school, this is a possible story that plays out for him daily. Talking to a teacher may go a long way to improving his classroom experience.
#3. Auditory Processing Disorder & Math Frustration
Sequencing is a learned skill that is commonly delayed in children with auditory processing disorder. It takes practice, and because APD children expend so much energy taking in information, they have very little capacity to manipulate or analyze it, including recognizing patterns or sequences.
Sequencing is a huge part of math logic. Not only is it helpful in learning math facts and basic math computations like long division, but higher-level math logic is almost all sequential — an inability to remember the order of steps is a major impediment to getting math.
#4. Auditory Processing Disorder & Learning To Read
Arguably, the most insidious impact of auditory processing disorder in children is how it impacts phonemic awareness and learning to read. Auditory processing and reading skills are highly correlated because there is causality.
Many parents think there is no issue if auditory processing is adequate to hear words as whole sounds for accurate listening and speaking. However, reading requires processing language at a much higher level of accuracy.
It is not good enough to hear “bat” as one sound. To recognize the word as text, he must be able to process the three sounds — the |b| |a| |t| — that make up the word. Unless those sounds, called phonemes, are heard clearly, your child will not recognize the word in print form.
This means the APD child needs to devise a whole new way of learning to read. Generally, this involves memorizing words as if they were an entirely separate language and then translating them back to word memory. This approach is arduous and inefficient. It can work for a year or two but eventually falls apart, leading to problems with fluency and/or reading comprehension in third or fourth grade.
5. Auditory Processing Disorder & Reading Comprehension
Auditory processing disorder and reading are also connected when discussing reading comprehension. Many children with APD, albeit those with milder delays, can make the gargantuan effort required to hear the sounds inside words and can learn to decode, only to run into problems with reading comprehension later.
Reading with comprehension requires automatic decoding. If decoding takes any concentration, there is less available mind space for taking in the meaning of the text. Children with auditory processing problems — remember, it’s like listening to sound through water — rarely achieve decoding automaticity due to the muddied way they hear words. Hence, reading comprehension is almost always at risk.
#6. Auditory Processing Disorder & Homework Stress
Everything that goes wrong on the day of a child with auditory processing disorder comes together during homework time. Homework requires:
- Following the lesson in class
- Catching and understanding the homework assignment
- Reading
- Energy at the end of an exhausting day
This fearsome combo is why homework stress is business as usual for parents of children with auditory processing disorder.
#7. Auditory Processing Disorder & Spelling
About 85% of all words are phonetically regular, like |bat| or |shop|. Once you know your letter sounds and hear the sounds inside the words, spelling these words is a snap. For most kids, spelling is about the remaining 15% of words for which there are spelling rules, exceptions, and irregular words- the so-called “red words” that need to be memorized. Learn those rules, etc., and you will be pretty much a speller.
This is not what lies ahead for young spellers with auditory processing problems. They don’t have the advantage of being able to hear the phonetic breakdown of words, which makes it easy to spell 85% of regular words. For them, every word is a red word.
#8. Auditory Processing Disorder & ADHD
One of the most important cognitive skills required for academic success is learning how to stay engaged and maintain sustained attention. Paying attention is easier if listening is comfortable and if the speaker is interesting.
This is hardly ever the case for children with auditory processing disorder. They find listening exhausting and often don’t process enough of a conversation or lecture to make sense of the material or find it interesting. Without the experience of settling in and listening, children with APD don’t get to practice attention skills.
Most children diagnosed with inattentive ADD have an underlying auditory processing disorder. The good news is that even though the answer to the question of whether auditory processing gets worse over time is no, in fact, processing does tend to improve with maturity. The bad news is that many of life’s higher-level skills, such as executive function, cannot fully develop, while APD impacts fundamental skills like attentiveness. So waiting for maturity to kick in is a risky approach.
#9. Auditory Processing Disorder & Writing Woes
Most children learn to write through observation. They learn the syntax and rules of language, how stories are laid out, and how arguments are made by analyzing and observing while listening and reading.
This is not the case for children with auditory processing problems. They have a limited capacity to observe the language they are processing while listening and even less so while reading. They do not notice the language syntax and grammar rules in the words they hear or read—they are too busy processing the words.
Consequently, children with APD often struggle mightily with both the fundamentals and composition of writing. The grammar rules, sentence structure, and argument construction are all quite foreign to them.
It’s A Matter of Degrees With Auditory Processing Disorder
For most children, auditory processing skills improve with age through listening and natural conversation.
For some, though, the challenge is more severe. If your child is struggling with phonemic awareness but does not appear to have difficulty with background noise—the classic symptom of auditory processing disorder in children—the presence of one or more of these listed consequences of auditory processing disorder may give you a clue that your child may need more help.
He may not necessarily grow out of his auditory processing delays by age 7, as most do, so you may want to explore auditory processing disorder treatments to speed up development. It’s good to let nature take its course, but gains can also be made if auditory processing improves through exercise. The sooner you start on that track, the better.
Gemm Learning uses Fast ForWord software at home to build essential language processing and pre-reading skills, and then reading comprehension.
