What Auditory Processing Disorder Sounds Like

What APD Sounds Like And Why It Often Goes Undetected

You wonder: Do I have auditory processing disorder, or does my child have auditory processing disorder? Here’s what an auditory processing deficit sounds like. It’s not about physical hearing; it’s about turning what you hear into usable language.

You’ve probably had the frustrating experience of conversing over a cell phone with weak reception. Words or even entire sentences get cut out, sounds get jumbled together, and static intrudes into the conversation.

Sometimes, with some work, you can use context to piece together the bits of speech that got cut off. Other times, you guess wrong, or you just don’t have any idea what’s been said. This is what auditory processing disorder sounds like.

This muddiness of sound is a big part of daily life for children and adults with Auditory Processing Disorder. APD is an auditory cognitive problem where sounds are heard accurately but not processed or understood accurately.

Like Sound Through Water

Most people with APD have normal hearing, but their brains have trouble interpreting auditory signals and parsing speech. Sounds blend and become muddy – or they go by without making any sense. Two other ways to think about what APD sounds like:

• It’s like a recording running too fast  — the world is speaking at 50 miles per hour, but the APD listener is processing at 30 miles an hour.
• Author Karen Foli used another way of thinking about APD. She writes that listening to sound with auditory processing disorder sounds like listening to sound through water.

For adults, every conversation is a struggle, particularly in noisy environments. Difficulty with background noise is the most common symptom of auditory processing disorder.

For children, conversations, following directions, listening to the teacher in class, hearing the sounds inside words when learning to read — it’s all a struggle. The F.A.T. City workshop illustrates these difficulties vividly.

Experience APD for Yourself – Braincipher Video

There is a famous video – video here – that replicates auditory simulation and also demonstrates the reading difficulties associated with APD

It is a little slow-moving, deliberately, as that is part of a child’s experience

After you’ve heard the text, try to answer the questions. You’ll feel a knot in your stomach, so reset the questions. It’s not fair, you’ll say. I didn’t hear the text properly. The simulation nails it to show how a person with APD feels. It’s harrowing.

Above all, you’re left thinking: how do folks with APD cope in the world? And if this resonates, could your child have APD?

An Echo Chamber

Because they cannot separate foreground and background sounds, people with APD find that their ability to listen deteriorates much more quickly in noisier environments.

Having APD is a little like living in a resonant echo chamber: if just one person is talking in the echo chamber, it takes effort to follow what they’re saying, and you might miss words here and there, but you can still follow along pretty well.

If you add more people or other kinds of noises to the echo chamber, it doesn’t take long for the sounds you want to focus on to become incomprehensible, as the background noise echo turns them into a mush.

Of course, this doesn’t suggest that people with auditory processing problems don’t understand anything said to them. But keeping up with what’s being said takes far more work for those who have APD than for those who don’t.

Because listening requires concentration, less brain bandwidth is available for comprehension.

Impact on Learning

The cumulative effect on learning can be dramatic. The consequences of this added need to concentrate on the sound itself are quite surprising.

Here is another take: an infographic on APD that summarizes how APD impacts various aspects of a child’s day.

Any Hearing Loss Creates APD Risk

While physical hearing difficulties differ from APD, they are connected. Children with hearing problems early in life do not get practice hearing and processing sounds—mainly language sounds—which can lead to auditory processing delays.

This includes temporary hearing loss due to ear infections or glue ear, and more permanent issues.

Hearing loss issues usually cause speech and language delays, which result in the child receiving professional attention, if not at home, then almost certainly at school.

However, some sources of hearing loss — ear infections, for instance — are less severe in their outward impact, i.e., no speech delays, but can undermine auditory processing skill development just as easily.

These are the children for whom auditory processing delays go unrecognized until much later in life, when reading becomes a real struggle and/or other learning issues develop.APD symptoms checklist here.

APD is Under-Diagnosed

While it is estimated that between 2% and 7% of the population receives a formal diagnosis of APD or at least auditory processing delays, a much larger portion of the population is not diagnosed.

This larger estimate of the prevalence of APD is based on the 30-40% of students who struggle with reading, specifically phonemic awareness and phonics, which are caused by auditory processing deficits, not necessarily rising to the level of APD, but an auditory processing delay nonetheless.

APD Can Be Hard To Detect

The relatively large portion of people with APD who slip under the radar can be explained by the fact that APD is hard to pick up on from the outside, particularly if there are no speech delays.

Children with APD mostly do fine on hearing tests and are more likely to have especially sensitive hearing. Their disability isn’t rooted in the way their ears are working but rather in the way their brain is making sense of the input it gets from the ears

However, the fact that it can go unnoticed from the outside doesn’t make the impacts of APD on all aspects of life any less serious. Listening is a crucial skill in our society, so any disorder that compromises people’s ability to interpret speech sounds will be disabling across a wide range of settings.

Background Noise

A hallmark symptom of APD is the inability to pick out specific sounds from background noise. Dichotic listening is another aspect of this—the ability to source and process sound in each ear.

For instance, in a room with multiple conversations, someone with APD might struggle to separate the voice they’re supposed to listen to from the other voices in the room.

Similarly, someone with APD walking down the street and talking to someone else might have trouble focusing on what’s being said rather than the sound of cars passing by in the background. Thus, there is an overlap between APD and other disorders involving attention problems, like ADHD.