Auditory Integration Disorder

What is Auditory Integration Disorder?

Auditory Integration Disorder is described as a type of auditory processing disorder that makes it hard for children to combine information that is given in more than one medium. This may translate as a problem when a child has to listen to directions and then perform a physical task, such as in a physical education class.

Clinicians will tell you that children with Auditory Integration Disorder find it easier to watch another person complete the activity and mimic it in that way. These children also have problems understanding words as a whole and this leads to poor spelling and word recognition.

Auditory Integration Disorder describes what happens when the left and right hemispheres of the brain do not communicate well with each other so the relationship between different pieces of information cannot be recognized.

Auditory Integration Disorder is caused by processing inefficiency. If a child is having to concentrate overly hard on deciphering language while listening, brain capacity is being diverted, and so the ability to integrate this information is compromised.

Learning, language processing and thinking are integrated functions that require many cognitive skills to function well. If there is a weakness in processing language there will almost always be an Auditory Integration Disorder.

How To Treat Auditory Integration Disorder

First, as we describe above, this is not a condition that exists in isolation. There will almost always be other auditory processing disorder symptoms present, making language processing either inefficient or worse, inaccurate.

Inefficient, in this case, means that expressive and receptive language are solid, vocabulary is normal, but processing is taking up an inordinate amount of concentration. For many children, this difficulty only surfaces in later grades, as this inefficiency leads to reading comprehension difficulties or attention deficits.

Gemm Learning addresses these difficulties with auditory integration with a unique APD treatment — powerful, clinical software that uses intense, adaptive algorithms to exercise and automate auditory processing, thereby freeing up brain capacity for listening and reading comprehension, for integration of information into a student’s knowledge base.